Spelling–stress regularity effects are intact in developmental dyslexia

Abstract

The current experiment investigated conflicting predictions regarding the effects of spelling–stress regularity on the lexical decision performance of skilled adult readers and adults with developmental dyslexia. In both reading groups, lexical decision responses were significantly faster and significantly more accurate when the orthographic structure of a word ending was a reliable as opposed to an unreliable predictor of lexical stress assignment. Furthermore, the magnitude of this spelling–stress regularity effect was found to be equivalent across reading groups. These findings are consistent with intact phoneme-level regularity effects also observed in dyslexia. The paper discusses how findings of intact spelling–sound regularity effects at both prosodic and phonemic levels, as well as other similar results, can be reconciled with the obvious difficulties that people with dyslexia experience in other domains of phonological processing.

Keywords:

• Dyslexia
• Lexical stress
• Spelling–sound regularity

Acknowledgments

This research forms part of the first author’s doctoral thesis and was supported by a postgraduate research fellowship awarded by the University of Warwick.