The children were significantly worse at identifying words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed than words that were mispronounced in other ways.
These mispronounced words were discarded from the sample.
This is important because the underlying representation of both mispronounced and correctly pronounced words is unclear.
Nonnative speakers constantly mispronounce words by taking the spelling as their guide.
The skilled readers seemed to have more knowledge of how the word should be spelled, even if they (rarely) mispronounced a word.
The danger of readers unfamiliar with such words mispronouncing the ending would be increased if words now spelt with oes were no longer distinguishedfromsingular os.
Typically, a word was mispronounced in the first of the four repetitions and then correctly pronounced in subsequent ones.
If consonants were mispronounced as singletons, then this same pronunciation in clusters was not penalized.