Difficulties in Lexical Stress versus Difficulties in Segmental Phonology among Adolescents with Dyslexia

Dyslexic difficulties in lexical stress were compared to difficulties in segmental phonology. Twenty-nine adolescents with dyslexia and 29 typically developing adolescents, matched on age and nonverbal ability, were assessed on reading, spelling, phonological and stress awareness, rapid naming, and short-term memory. Group differences in stress assignment were larger than in segmental phonology in reading and spelling pseudowords but not words, indicating a fragility of explicit processes that manipulate stress representations. Despite impaired stress performance in dyslexia at the group level, individual variability failed to reveal evidence for a stress-specific deficit or for a distinct stress-impaired subgroup.