No influence of regular rhythmic priming on grammaticality judgment and sentence comprehension in English-speaking children

Abstract

A growing body of research has demonstrated the association between music and language, particularly between rhythm and grammar skills in children. A compelling piece of evidence for the influence of music on language comes from findings that a brief exposure to regular musical rhythm improved subsequent syntactic language performance in children. Nevertheless, those observations were made on one particular task, i.e., grammaticality judgment, mostly with French-speaking children. Here, we sought to corroborate and extend the rhythmic priming effect with English-speaking children aged 7 to 12 years who underwent two different syntactic tasks on spoken sentences: one involving judgment on morphosyntactic well-formedness (grammaticality judgment) and the other requiring noun–verb relation analysis (sentence comprehension), both following either regular or irregular rhythmic priming. Half of the children were administered synthetic speech stimuli (Experiment 1), and the other half were presented with natural speech (Experiment 2). Across the two experiments, we did not find any rhythmic priming effect; children’s performance on both the grammaticality judgment and sentence comprehension tasks was comparable irrespective of the regularity in prior rhythms. These results imply that the positive influence of regular rhythmic priming on syntactic processing may be confined to specific language or age populations, warranting further investigation.