This paper investigates the relationship between ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 7-8 years. Their tasks consisted of reading words, reading non-words, stressing non-words and reproducing sequences of two, three or four non-words by pressing the corresponding keys on the computer keyboard. Non-word sequences were constructed with minimal non-word pairs differing in a single phoneme (/kupi/-/kuti/) or in the stress pattern (/mipa/-/mipa/). Results showed that performance on phoneme contrast sequences (e.g. /kupi/-/kuti/) predicted word reading. In contrast, performance on stress contrast sequences (e.g. /mipa/-/mipa/) predicted non-word reading, but only when two-non-word sequences were analysed. This suggests that stress sensitivity may be one of the factors related to reading fluency as most errors at reading non-words consisted of false starts and pauses between syllables. Results also showed that stress sensitivity (scored in two non-word sequences) predicted stress assignment, and that knowledge of stress rules predicted both word and non-word reading. This suggests that stress sensitivity may help in learning stress rules, and that knowledge of stress rules is relevant for reading.