Using Motor Tempi to Understand Rhythm and Grammatical Skills in Developmental Language Disorder and Typical Language Development

Abstract

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) show relative weaknesses on rhythm tasks beyond their characteristic linguistic impairments. The current study compares preferred tempo and the width of an entrainment region for 5- to 7-year-old typically developing children and children with DLD and considers the associations with rhythm aptitude and expressive grammar skills in the two populations. Preferred tempo was measured with a spontaneous motor tempo task (tapping tempo at a comfortable speed) and the width (range) of an entrainment region was measured by the difference between the upper (slow) and lower (fast) limits of tapping a rhythm normalized by an individual’s spontaneous motor tempo. Data from N = 16 children with DLD and N = 114 children with TD showed that whereas entrainment-region width did not differ across the two groups, slowest motor tempo, the determinant of the upper (slow) limit of the entrainment region, was at a faster tempo in children with DLD vs. TD. Entrainment-region width was positively associated with rhythm aptitude and receptive grammar even after taking into account potential confounding factors, whereas expressive grammar did not show an association with any of the tapping measures. Preferred tempo was not associated with any study variables after including covariates in the analyses. These results motivate future neuroscientific studies of low-frequency neural oscillatory mechanisms as the potential neural correlates of entrainment-region width and their associations with musical rhythm and spoken language processing in children with typical and atypical language development.

The mediating role of childhood motor skills on the association between error correction and social pragmatic communication in adulthood

“…Kasten, Jacoby, & Ahissar (2023) corroborated these findings, demonstrating that individuals with ASC exhibited impairments in tempo tracking, particularly in response to tempo accelerations (Kasten, Jacoby, & Ahissar, 2023). Motor synchronization, measured through finger tapping, was associated with receptive grammar skills in children with and without developmental language disorder (Ladányi et al, 2023). Such a predictive association between error correction/synchronization and ASC or SPC should be present if there is a causal relationship.…”

Children With Developmental Language Disorder Show Deficits in the Production of Musical Rhythmic Groupings

“…Several investigators have identified deficits in the perception of rhythmic structure in DLD ( Bedoin et al, 2016 ; Caccia & Lorusso, 2021 ; Cumming, Wilson, Leong, et al, 2015 ; Sallat & Jentschke, 2015 ; Weinert, 1992 ). Production results have focused primarily on lower level rhythmic skills such as metronomic timing, which contain repeated rhythmic events with no higher level grouping structure ( Corriveau & Goswami, 2009 ; Ladányi et al, 2023 ; Vuolo et al, 2017 ; Zelaznik & Goffman, 2010 ). We now show that children with DLD demonstrate deficits in organizing rhythmic events into higher order rhythmic groupings.…”

“…Rhythmic production has been studied far less than perception in both TD children (e.g., Bonacina et al, 2019 ; Drake, 1993 ; Kim et al, 2022 ; Ladányi et al, 2023 ; McAuley et al, 2006 ) and children with DLD ( Ladányi et al, 2023 ; Vuolo et al, 2017 ; Zelaznik & Goffman, 2010 ). Rhythmic production encompasses skills such as metronomic timing and rhythmic grouping ( Drake, 1993 ).…”

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

“…Details of screening measures and language characterisations used to determine eligibility for the study are detailed below; N = 132 were included in the final dataset. Note that data from the same cohort, including the language screening characterisations, non-verbal IQ and the expressive grammar (SPELT-3) variables, are also utilised as the sample with typical language development in another study focused on motor timing in developmental language disorder 92 .…”