This paper presents a study on the robustness of stress information for automatic speech recognition in the presence of noise. The syllable stress, extracted from the speech signal, was integrated in the recognition process by means of a previously proposed decoding method. Experiments were conducted for several signal-to-noise ratio conditions and the results show that stress information is robust in the presence of medium to low noise. This was found to be true both when syllable boundary information was used for stress detection and when this information was not available. Furthermore, the obtained relative improvement increased with a decrease in signal quality, indicating that the stressed parts of the signal can be considered islands of reliability.