Lexical Stress & Reading Rhythm: Learning to Distinguish between Function and Content Words

This research examined the textual organisation skills of Spanish-speaking students in Years 3, 5 and 6 of primary education during oral reading. It focused on studying how readers use lexical stress to group function and content words into rhythmic-stress units. Acoustic parameters, both segmental and suprasegmental, were compared between unstressed vowels in function words and stressed vowels in content words when reading a narrative text. A sample of 90 native speakers of Rioplatense were used in the study. The results showed that students exhibited increasing phonetic differentiation between function and content words as they progressed through school levels, indicating progress in the acquisition of rhythmic-stress organisation in reading. Further studies are needed to validate these findings in other settings. Nevertheless, our observations reflect a progressive development in the ability to integrate words into coherent prosodic units, leading to more fluent and expressive reading. Furthermore, the phono-syntactic unit ‘rhythmic group’ may demonstrate automaticity that extends beyond individual words and the textual organisation skills of readers, with implications for the education, teaching and clinical aspects of written language acquisition.