The existence of a necessary association between phonological awareness (PA) and oral reading development has been questioned using evidence from children with Down syndrome. In this study, 22 children with Down syndrome (between the ages of 6;7 and 10;3) initially completed tests of receptive language, cognitive function, oral reading, and PA. Reading and PA were reassessed approximately 9 months later. Better oral reading was associated with superior phoneme segmentation skills on reassessment. Furthermore, there was some evidence that early segmentation ability predicted later nonword reading, but not the reverse. The results indicate an association between PA and early oral reading ability in children with Down syndrome and are interpreted within a theoretical view of reading development in which PA plays a central role.

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The experiments reported here were designed to investigate the influence of stress typicality during speeded grammatical classification of disyllabic English words by native and non-native speakers. Trochaic nouns and iambic gram verbs were considered to be typically stressed, whereas iambic nouns and trochaic verbs were considered to be atypically stressed. Experiments 1a and 2a showed that while native speakers classified typically stressed words individual more quickly and more accurately than atypically stressed words during differences reading, there were no overall effects during classification of spoken stimuli. However, a subgroup of native speakers with high error rates did show a significant effect during classification of spoken stimuli. Experiments 1b and 2b showed that non-native speakers classified typically stressed words more quickly and more accurately than atypically stressed words during reading. Typically stressed words were classified more accurately than atypically stressed words when the stimuli were spoken. Importantly, there was a significant relationship between error rates, vocabulary size and the size of the stress typicality effect in each experiment. We conclude that participants use information about lexical stress to help them distinguish between disyllabic nouns and verbs during speeded grammatical classification. This is especially so for individuals with a limited vocabulary who lack other knowledge (e.g., semantic knowledge) about the differences between these grammatical categories.

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