Word stress production in three‐year‐old children at risk of dyslexia

Abstract

We investigated Dutch word stress acquisition in 3-year-old children at risk of dyslexia (children with at least one parent or older sibling with reading difficulties) and normally developing children, in order to shed light on language acquisition delays in children at risk of dyslexia, as well as to investigate further phonological deficits in dyslexia. The children had to repeat non-words with stress patterns varying in regularity. Both the at-risk and control children performed better on imitation of regular stress targets and worse on irregular and prohibited stress patterns. However, the at-risk children showed more difficulty imitating irregular and prohibited patterns, and had lower percentages phonemes correct than the control group. The results can be interpreted as a delay in word stress acquisition in the at-risk group. The findings thus point towards a phonological deficit early in language development.

The Influence of Accent Pattern Typicality on Immediate and Delayed Nonword Repetition

“…The results for children's repetition of tri-mora words reported by Sakono et al (2011) showed the accent typicality effect because phonemic representations of words in children could be weaker than those in adults. This hypothesis might generalize across languages as it would also explain the children's data obtained for words in stress-accent languages (de Bree et al, 2006;Roy & Chiat, 2004). Thus, it is possible to argue that accent patterns have an impact on word-learning/language acquisition through establishing phonological representations in short-term memory (Gathercole, 2006), as well as segmenting phrases using suprasegmental probability (e.g., Mattys, Jusczyk, Luce, & Morgan, 1999) and facilitating children's vocal learning in their first languages (e.g., Mampe, Friederici, Christophe, & Wermke, 2009).…”

“…Stress-accent languages also showed similar typicality-based phenomena. For instance, English (e.g., Roy & Chiat, 2004) and Dutch studies (e.g., de Bree, Wijnen, & Zonneveld, 2006) have found a typicality/regularity effect of stress position on nonword repetition in children. However, their scoring methods also conflate segmental and suprasegmental features.…”

“…However, their scoring methods also conflate segmental and suprasegmental features. For example, Roy and Chiat (2004) calculated syllable loss, and though de Bree et al (2006) employed phoneme accuracy rate, the index included syllable/phoneme addition and omission (due to the fact that their nonword stimuli had various lengths and syllable weights).…”

Stress assignment in aphasia: Word and non-word reading and non-word repetition

“…This renders the expectation that stress production should also be poorer for a dyslexic population than for a non-dyslexic population. Indeed, it has been found that non-word repetition of these same targets was poorer in a group of children with a familial risk of dyslexia (de Bree, Wijnen, & Zonneveld, 2006) and a group of children with developmental dyslexia (de Bree, 2007) than in their age-matched controls. Thus, in both aphasia and dyslexia, production of irregular stress patterns is affected and yields regularization of irregular patterns.…”

Word Accent Repetition in Japanese Children With Reading Difficulties

“…de Bree, Wijnen, and Zonneveld (2006) investigated word stress acquisition in three-year-old children at risk of dyslexia and normally developing Dutch children. e children had to repeat nonwords with stress patterns varying in regularity.…”