Does rhythmic priming improve grammatical processing in Hungarian-speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder?

Abstract

Special thanks go to the children, their teachers and parents for their kindness and cooperation. We thank Ágnes Kovács for her inevitable help in screening our participants and Lilla Zakariás for her help in recording the stimuli and helpful advices about task procedures. A huge thank goes to Dr. Reyna Gordon and the Music Cognition Lab of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville for the fruitful discussions and motivating environment. Research Highlights• 6-year-old Hungarian-speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder perform better on a grammatical task subsequent to exposure to a regular rhythm vs. an irregular rhythm/silence• The effect of regular rhythm is specific: it improves performance on a grammatical task but not on a word retrieval or a non-linguistic task• Difference between performance following regular vs. irregular rhythm originates from the facilitating effect of the regular rhythm (not the negative effect of the irregular rhythm)• The results highlight the importance of rhythm in speech processing, and point towards a possible intervention tool in language disorders Abstract Research has described several features shared between musical rhythm and speech or language, and experimental studies consistently show associations between performance on tasks in the two domains as well as impaired rhythm processing in children with language disorders. Motivated by these results, in the current study our first aim was to explore whether the activation of the shared system underlying rhythm and language processing with a regular musical rhythm can improve subsequent grammatical processing in preschool-aged Hungarianspeaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Second, we investigated whether rhythmic priming is specific to grammar processing by assessing priming in two additional domains: a linguistic but non-grammatical task (picture naming) and a nonlinguistic task (nonverbal Stroop task). Third, to confirm that the rhythmic priming effect originates from the facilitating effect of the regular rhythm and not the negative effect of the control condition, we added a third condition, silence, for all the three tasks. Both groups of children showed better performance on the grammaticality judgment task in the regular compared to both the irregular and the silent conditions but no such effect appeared in the nongrammatical and non-linguistic tasks. These results suggest that 1) rhythmic priming can improve grammatical processing in Hungarian, a language with complex morphosyntax, both in children with and without DLD, 2) the effect is specific to grammar and 3) is a result of the facilitating effect of the regular rhythm.

Is atypical rhythm a risk factor for developmental speech and language disorders?

“…Similarly to dyslexia, the presentation of a regular rhythmic prime enhances subsequent grammatical sentence judgments in children with DLD compared to both irregular primes ( Ladányi et al, submitted ; Przybylski et al, 2013 ) and neutral non-musical auditory primes ( Bedoin et al, 2016 ), supporting the hypothesis that rhythm and language processing are related and suggested that using rhythm in the therapy of children with DLD might facilitate speech/language therapy.…”

“…In addition, there is ample evidence of better performance on various language tasks after rhythm/music training in the typically developing population ( Degé & Schwarzer, 2011 ; Linnavalli, Putkinen, Lipsanen, Huotilainen, & Tervaniemi, 2018 ; Patscheke, Degé, & Schwarzer, 2016 ; Rautenberg, 2015 ; Taub & Lazarus, 2012 ; Zhao & Kuhl, 2016 ). Moreover, several studies have found a short-term facilitating effect of regular rhythm on subsequent grammar task performance in typically developing children ( Ladányi, Lukács, & Gervain, submitted ; Bedoin, Brisseau, Molinier, Roch, & Tillmann, 2016 ; Canette et al, 2020 ; Chern, Tillmann, Vaughan, & Gordon, 2018 ; Przybylski et al, 2013 ). In addition, better speech/language skills, such as more efficient speech processing and word segmentation, have been reported for musicians compared to non-musicians ( Brod & Opitz, 2012 ; François, Jaillet, Takerkart, & Schön, 2014 ; Marie, Magne, & Besson, 2011 ; Musacchia, Sams, Skoe, & Kraus, 2007 ; Sares, Foster, Allen, & Hyde, 2018 ; Zuk et al, 2013 ), although this advantage could originate from other differences between musicians and non-musicians beyond differences in rhythm skills.…”

Processing rhythm in speech and music: Shared mechanisms and implications for developmental speech and language disorders.

“…Though the effect of these shorter rhythmic cues may possibly be explained by auditory short-term memory of the same matching pattern, similar effects have been found with longer (∼30 s) rhythmic primes that persist over six subsequent naturally pronounced sentences. Regular rhythmic primes facilitate grammatical judgments of orally presented sentences compared to irregular rhythmic primes for English (Chern et al, 2018), French (e.g., Canette et al, 2020; Fiveash, Bedoin, et al, 2020; Przybylski et al, 2013), and Hungarian (Ladányi, Lukács, & Gervain, 2020) children. These findings suggest that music rhythm can entrain temporal attentional cycles, which can persist after the music has ended and influence subsequent language processing, or even simple detection of events (Hickok et al, 2015).…”

“…Benefits of rhythm regularity in priming stimuli and rhythmic cueing have been observed across these three speech and language disorders. Presenting a regular rhythm before a set of sentences has been shown to enhance grammatical processing for children with DLD and dyslexia compared to both irregular primes (Ladányi, Lukács, & Gervain, 2020; Przybylski et al, 2013) and environmental sound scenes (Bedoin et al, 2016). These findings suggest a role for sustained neural oscillations stimulated by musical rhythm (i.e., in the prime) in improving temporal expectations for various aspects of the subsequently presented speech signal (e.g., morphosyntactic cues for enhanced grammatical processing) even in developmental disorders.…”

Exploring individual differences in musical rhythm and grammar skills in school-aged children with typically developing language

“…Therefore, advancing the understanding of the role of rhythm in acquisition of grammatical skills might be instrumental in providing new perspectives into studying language disorders. It is interesting to note that rhythmic priming experiments, in which participants actively listen to musical sequences with a strong and predictable rhythm (prime) prior to language trials (target), have shown that listening to regular rhythms enhances the performance of the listener in a sentence imitation task that measures phonological accuracy 12 , and in grammaticality judgement tasks [13][14][15] . These effects have been shown in both typically developing participants and in those with reading, hearing, and language disorders 12,14,16 .…”