title: Impaired stress awareness in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia.
abstract: The role of segmental phonology in developmental dyslexia (DD) is well established (e.g., deficit in phonological awareness), but the role of suprasegmental phonology (prosody) has been less widely investigated. Stress is one of the main prosodic features and refers to the relative prominence of syllables (strong/weak) within a word. The aim of the present study is to examine stress awareness in children with dyslexia and the possible mediation of phonemic awareness on suprasegmental phonological skills. Thirty-one Spanish children with DD and 31 chronological age-control children participated. Two stress awareness tasks were administrated, one with words and another with pseudowords. Results show that the children with dyslexia performed more poorly on both tasks than control children. The pattern of results in accuracy and reaction time suggest that, while children without difficulties use different strategies depending on the type of item, the children with dyslexia employ the same strategy to resolve the two tasks without any benefit of lexical knowledge about stress. Even so, this strategy did not work so efficiently as it did in the control group, which led the group with dyslexia to make a greater number of mistakes. It was also found that, when phonemic awareness was entered as a covariate, accuracy differences disappeared, but only in the word stress task. However, when lexical knowledge was not necessary (as in the pseudoword stress task) differences still remained statistically significant. Implications on the importance of suprasegmental processing in reading acquisition disabilities are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, University of Granada, Campus de Cartuja s/n, 18071 Granada, Spain. Electronic address: gracijf@ugr.es.
authors.forename: Gracia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Jiménez-Fernández
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Jaén, Campus Las Lagunillas, Edificio Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación II (C5), 23071 Jaén, Spain.
authors.forename: Nicolás
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Gutiérrez-Palma
authors.affiliation: Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, University of Granada, Campus de Cartuja s/n, 18071 Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: Sylvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Defior
mesh_terms: D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D001308:Auditory Perceptual Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001364:Awareness; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013030:Spain
keywords: Developmental dyslexia; Phonemic awareness; Prosody; Stress awareness; Suprasegmental phonology