Word stress competence and literacy in Dutch children with a family risk of dyslexia and children with dyslexia

This study assessed Dutch word stress acquisition in children with (a familial risk of) dyslexia and normally developing children. Word stress production was measured through repetition of non-words with stress patterns varying in regularity. Both three-year-old children with a family risk of dyslexia and nineyear-old dyslexic children had more difficulties on this task than agematched children without a family risk of dyslexia and without dyslexia. For the three-year-olds, word stress performance was related to their phonological, but not to their literacy abilities at age eight. For the nine-year-olds, associations were found between word stress production, verbal working memory, and literacy. It is argued that there is a bidirectional relationship between segmental representations and word stress abilities. The findings are interpreted within the phonological deficit hypothesis of dyslexia.