Lexical stress awareness in native Spanish adolescent speakers

Abstract

Research has shown that prosodic awareness is related to reading fluency and comprehension in primary school children. However, fewer studies have focused on the prosodic awareness of secondary school adolescents. In particular, this pilot study explores how Spanish adolescent listeners identify lexical stress in Spanish. We hypothesize that teenagers will find some difficulties in the perception of lexical stress. Ten 1st-year female students (age range: 12-13) carried out a perceptual identification task aimed at detecting the stressed syllable in three-syllable pseudowords read by three different native Spanish speakers. Participants were required to identify the word they heard from sets of three words that were orthographically identical but contrasted in stress placement, presented in written form. Stress was placed on the first, second or third syllable of words (e. g. ‘sémapa’, ‘semapa’, ‘semapá’). The results revealed that adolescents encountered difficulties in identifying stress on the second syllable (‘semapa’). In this case, stress was mostly perceived on the first syllable (‘sémapa’), and to a lesser extent on the third one (‘semapá’). We hypothesize that the lack of an orthographic mark on words stressed on the second syllable may have led to confusion when determining the stressed syllable.