New evidence of a rhythmic priming effect that enhances grammaticality judgments in children

Abstract

Musical rhythm and the grammatical structure of language share a surprising number of characteristics that may be intrinsically related in child development. The current study aimed to understand the potential influence of musical rhythmic priming on subsequent spoken grammar task performance in children with typical development who were native speakers of English. Participants (ages 5-8 years) listened to rhythmically regular and irregular musical sequences (within-participants design) followed by blocks of grammatically correct and incorrect sentences upon which they were asked to perform a grammaticality judgment task. Rhythmically regular musical sequences improved performance in grammaticality judgment compared with rhythmically irregular musical sequences. No such effect of rhythmic priming was found in two nonlinguistic control tasks, suggesting a neural overlap between rhythm processing and mechanisms recruited during grammar processing. These findings build on previous research investigating the effect of rhythmic priming by extending the paradigm to a different language, testing a younger population, and employing nonlanguage control tasks. These findings of an immediate influence of rhythm on grammar states (temporarily augmented grammaticality judgment performance) also converge with previous findings of associations between rhythm and grammar traits (stable generalized grammar abilities) in children. Taken together, the results of this study provide additional evidence for shared neural processing for language and music and warrant future investigations of potentially beneficial effects of innovative musical material on language processing.

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

“…To test the specificity of rhythmic priming to language processing, we included a non-linguistic task (non-verbal Stroop task) to our design complementing the grammaticality judgment task. Although one previous study (Chern et al, 2018) suggested a language-specific effect, the non-linguistic tasks used in that study differed considerably from the grammaticality judgment task in several respects such as the number of blocks, number of trials within the blocks or the way how trials were presented.…”

“…In the majority of the rhythmic priming studies, participants are exposed to an auditory signal (e.g., sequence of percussion beats) with either a regular or irregular beat/non-rhythmic stimuli before completing a linguistic task. Previous research has found an improved performance on a grammaticality judgment task after presentation of a regular rhythmic prime in Germanspeaking patients with basal ganglia injury (Kotz et al, 2005) and Parkinson disease (Kotz & Gunter, 2015), French-speaking children with dyslexia (Przybylski et al, 2013) and DLD (Bedoin et al, 2016;Przybylski et al, 2013) as well as with typically developing Frenchspeaking (Bedoin et al, 2016;Fiveash, Bedoin, Lalitte, & Tillmann, accepted;Przybylski et al, 2013) and English-speaking (Chern et al, 2018) children. The effect was also found in young adults with and without dyslexia who showed a larger ERP response to grammatical violations following regular vs. the irregular primes .…”

“…As the beat rate of the presented music in the above experiments matches the average rate of stressed syllables in speech (2 Hz), after listening to the musical stimuli the system gets into an ideal state to process speech stimuli. As discussed above, speech also has temporal regularities but in a smaller degree than music, thus without musical stimuli it can take more time for oscillators to synchronize with the regularities of speech stimuli than when musical stimuli are presented before the speech stimuli (see a similar account in Bedoin et al, 2016;Chern, Tillmann, Vaughan, & Gordon, 2018;Kotz, Gunter, & Wonneberger, 2005;Kotz, Schwartze, & Schmidt-Kassow, 2015;Przybylski et al, 2013). The limited research targeting the neural background of the rhythmic priming effect is in line with the above explanation (Falk, Lanzilotti, & Schön, 2017).…”

“…It is possible that exposure to a regular rhythm is sufficient to boost morphological processing in languages with a simple morphology but does not have an effect in morphologically complex languages in which a greater variety of suffixes need to be processed, with sometimes multiple suffixes attached to a stem. For example, in the Chern et al (2018) study children always had to detect a missing third person singular -s as a number agreement error and a missing past tense -ed as a tense agreement error. The realization of these error types could not be made more diverse because in English, in the present tense verb conjugation paradigm, all forms are the same (I/you/we/you/they paint) except the 3rd person singular ((s)he paints) and in the past tense paradigm, all forms are exactly the same (I/you/(s)he/we/you/they painted).…”

Shared neural resources of rhythm and syntax: An ALE Meta-Analysis

“…Moreover, priming with rhythmic sequences containing easy-to-extract meter facilitated language comprehension compared to priming with rhythms that induced a complex meter (Przybylski et al, 2013). This facilitation effect does not appear to transfer to math and visuospatial tasks (Chern et al, 2018). Beyond these examples of interference and facilitation, Bedoin and colleagues (2017) demonstrated a transfer of training between the two domains by developing a rhythm training program to restore syntax comprehension abilities for congenitally deaf children with cochlear implants.…”