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The development of stress sensitivity and its contribution to word reading in school-aged children
Candise Y Lin1, Min Wang2, Rochelle S Newman3
1Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, USA.
Background:
This study examined the development of stress sensitivity and its relationship with word reading. Previous research has rarely measured phoneme and stress sensitivity in the same task, making a direct comparison of the contribution between the two in reading development difficult.
Methods:
Participants were native English-speaking adults and children at ages of 6, 8, and 10 years (N = 24, 22, 22, and 24, respectively). A lexical decision task was used to measure both stress and phoneme sensitivity. Oral vocabulary, phoneme awareness, and word reading were assessed.
Results:
Stress sensitivity accounted for unique variance in reading over and above vocabulary and phoneme awareness in 6-year-olds. Both adults and children had better phoneme sensitivity than stress sensitivity.
Conclusions:
These findings highlight the unique contribution of stress sensitivity in reading development. The current study made a novel contribution to studying the relationship between prosody and literacy by utilising a task that is able to assess children's stress and phoneme sensitivity simultaneously.
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