Beyond phonological awareness: Stress awareness and learning word spelling

This study investigates whether prosody is related to spelling acquisition. The awareness of a particular prosodic feature, lexical stress, may play some role in the acquisition of word spelling. A sample of 89 Spanish 3rd graders participated in this study. Control measures included non-verbal intelligence, vocabulary, and phonemic awareness. Results highlighted the potential role of prosodic knowledge in learning word spelling. Lexical stress awareness accounted for unique variance in word and sentence writing from dictation. In particular, stress awareness was related to stress errors (in word and sentence writing) while phonemic awareness was related to phoneme errors (in word writing). These data support the view that, in addition to phonological awareness, prosodic (lexical stress) awareness has the potential to be relevant for learning word spelling. •Lexical stress awareness makes a unique contribution to spelling skills in Spanish 3rd graders.•Phonemic and stress awareness make different contribution to single-word writing.•Lexical stress awareness is a significant predictor of spelling even in a sentence context.•Stress processing tasks could perhaps be used for diagnosis and intervention in reading difficulties.•Stress awareness training could be useful for teaching to write without stress mark mistakes.