Lexical stress awareness and orthographic stress in Spanish

• Beyond phonological awareness, lexical stress awareness makes a unique contribution to word reading.
• Lexical stress awareness is related to word reading accuracy.
• Lexical stress awareness is mainly related to stress errors.
• Education professionals should promote the development of stress awareness.

This work aims to study whether prosody is related to reading acquisition. In particular, the study focuses on lexical stress, and on the awareness of lexical stress measured by the ability to detect the loudest syllable in a pseudoword. The hypothesis is that stress awareness may play a role in the acquisition of word reading in Spanish. A cross-sectional study was carried out with 233 children from 3rd to 6th grades. Cognitive and phonemic awareness skills were tested. A lexical stress awareness task and a reading aloud task were also used. Results highlight the relevance of prosodic knowledge in learning how to read the Spanish written words. In all grades, lexical stress awareness appears to be related to stress reading errors. On the contrary, phonemic awareness is not related to stress errors, except in 4th grade. These data are discussed considering that, apart from phonological awareness, prosodic (lexical stress) awareness would also be relevant in reading acquisition.