Impaired perception of syllable stress in children with dyslexia: A longitudinal study

• We present the first longitudinal study of prosodic awareness in dyslexia.
• Two syllable stress perception tasks were administered at 9 and 13 years.
• Both tasks showed significantly poorer stress perception in dyslexia.
• At age 9, dyslexic children performed more poorly than RL controls aged 7 years.
• Rise time processing was a longitudinal predictor of prosodic awareness.

Prosodic patterning is a key structural element of spoken language. However, the potential role of prosodic awareness in the phonological difficulties that characterise children with developmental dyslexia has been little studied. Here we report the first longitudinal study of sensitivity to syllable stress in children with dyslexia, enabling the exploration of predictive factors. An initial cohort of 104 children was recruited. In Experiment 1 (mean age 9 years), participants received a reiterative speech task (DeeDee task) and in Experiment 2 (4 years later, mean age 13 years), they received a direct stress perception task. The children with dyslexia were compared to both younger reading-level matched controls (aged 7 years initially) and to age-matched controls. Children with dyslexia showed impaired sensitivity to syllable stress compared to both reading-level and age-matched controls when aged 9 years, and to age-matched controls only when aged 13 years. The longitudinal predictors of sensitivity to syllable stress were investigated, controlling for prosodic sensitivity at Time 1 as the autoregressor. Measures of auditory sensory processing and sub-lexical phonological awareness were unique longitudinal predictors. Prosodic sensitivity in children was also a significant longitudinal predictor of reading development, accounting for independent variance from sub-lexical phonological sensitivity (rhyme awareness).