Processing of Rhythm in Speech and Music in Adult Dyslexia

Abstract

Recent studies have suggested that musical rhythm perception ability can affect the phonological system. The most prevalent causal account for developmental dyslexia is the phonological deficit hypothesis. As rhythm is a subpart of phonology, we hypothesized that reading deficits in dyslexia are associated with rhythm processing in speech and in music. In a rhythmic grouping task, adults with diagnosed dyslexia and age-matched controls listened to speech streams with syllables alternating in intensity, duration, or neither, and indicated whether they perceived a strong-weak or weak-strong rhythm pattern. Additionally, their reading and musical rhythm abilities were measured. Results showed that adults with dyslexia had lower musical rhythm abilities than adults without dyslexia. Moreover, lower musical rhythm ability was associated with lower reading ability in dyslexia. However, speech grouping by adults with dyslexia was not impaired when musical rhythm perception ability was controlled: like adults without dyslexia, they showed consistent preferences. However, rhythmic grouping was predicted by musical rhythm perception ability, irrespective of dyslexia. The results suggest associations among musical rhythm perception ability, speech rhythm perception, and reading ability. This highlights the importance of considering individual variability to better understand dyslexia and raises the possibility that musical rhythm perception ability is a key to phonological and reading acquisition.

Advances in the Neurocognition of Music and Language

“…As argued in the review article of Reybrouck and Podlipniak [9], some of these sound features and their common preconceptual affective meanings may even reflect joint evolutionary roots of M&L that still prevail today, for example, in musical expressivity and speech prosody. Notably, a feature that was particularly central to half of all contributions is the temporal structure of M&L, i.e., the patterning of strong and weak syllables or beats that make up rhythm, meter and prosodic stress [6][7][8][10][11][12][13]15].…”

“…The authors argue that this pattern of deficits may arise from a basic deficiency in timekeeping mechanisms that affect rhythm perception across domains. Second, Boll-Avetisyan et al [7] used multiple regression analyses and found that musical rhythm perception abilities predicted rhythmic grouping preferences in speech in adults with and without dyslexia. Similarly, in an EEG study, Fotidzis et al [8] found that musical rhythmic skills predicted children's neural sensitivity to mismatches between the speech rhythm of a written word and an auditory rhythm.…”

“…Potential downstream effects of general rhythmic processing skills on higher-order linguistic abilities are currently being extensively investigated, particularly in the context of first language acquisition (for a recent review, see [24]). Accordingly, several studies in this Special Issue probe whether the acoustic properties of speech rhythm can serve as scaffolding for the acquisition of stable phonological representations [12], for the segmentation of words from continuous speech and the construction of lexical representations [13], for the recognition of syntactic units in sentences [10] and for reading [7,8,11]. For example, Richards and Goswami [10] explain that prosody, particularly the hierarchical structuring of stressed and unstressed syllables, provides reliable cues to the syntactic structure of speech [25] and can hence facilitate learning of syntactic language organization [26].…”

“…If rhythmic processing disabilities are indeed the basis of speech and language disorders, then useful avenues for prevention and intervention could lie in (i) increasing the regularity of stimuli, or (ii) strengthening individual rhythmic abilities with the aim at improving neuronal entrainment [37][38][39]. Several studies in this Special Issue deal directly or indirectly with these ideas, either by exploring processing benefits of rhythmically highly regular stimuli such as songs [13,14] or poems [10,11], or by discussing potential protective or curative effects of music-based rhythm training on language skills [7,8,10,12,15,16]. Even though the results are promising, they also raise a number of questions.…”

“…Sixteen research papers and reviews from 48 experts in linguistics, musicology, cognitive neuroscience, biological psychology and educational sciences demonstrate that research has been active on all fronts. As we will see, the studies follow two burgeoning trends in M&L research: First, they focused on common auditory processing of temporal regularities [ 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ] that are thought to promote higher-level linguistic functions [ 8 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ], possibly via mechanisms of neuronal entrainment [ 15 ]. Second, they explored top-down modulations of common auditory processes [ 16 , 17 , 18 ] by domain-general cognitive [ 19 , 20 ] and motor functions in both perception and production [ 21 ].…”