Abstract

Rhythm organizes events in time and plays a major role in music, but also in the phonology and prosody of a language. Interestingly, children with developmental dyslexia—a learning disability that affects reading acquisition despite normal intelligence and adequate education—have a poor rhythmic perception. It has been suggested that an accurate perception of rhythmical/metrical structure, that requires accurate perception of rise time, may be critical for phonological development and subsequent literacy. This hypothesis is mostly based on results showing a high degree of correlation between phonological awareness and metrical skills, using a very specific metrical task. We present new findings from the analysis of a sample of 48 children with a diagnosis of dyslexia, without comorbidities. These children were assessed with neuropsychological tests, as well as specifically-devised psychoacoustic and musical tasks mostly testing temporal abilities. Associations were tested by multivariate analyses including data mining strategies, correlations and most importantly logistic regressions to understand to what extent the different auditory and musical skills can be a robust predictor of reading and phonological skills. Results show a strong link between several temporal skills and phonological and reading abilities. These findings are discussed in the framework of the neuroscience literature comparing music and language processing, with a particular interest in the links between rhythm processing in music and language.

Highlights

  • Music is a complex activity that taps onto several sensory-motor, cognitive and emotional mechanisms

  • Our study focuses on the relation between musical abilities and reading skills in children with developmental dyslexia

  • In this study we investigated the link between different levels of temporal processing and reading skills in developmental dyslexia

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Summary

Introduction

Music is a complex activity that taps onto several sensory-motor, cognitive and emotional mechanisms. Over the last two decades many studies have tested the hypothesis that music training (implying formal training and/or regular practice) can impact non-musical abilities Most of these studies have addressed this issue by comparing a population of musicians, either professional or amateur, and a population of non-musicians, namely participants with little or no music training. Music shares many basic processes with other human activities, and this is evident when comparing music and speech (Besson and Schön, 2011). Both rely on sound processing and require a precise—though often categorical—representation of several sound features, such as timbre, pitch, duration, and their interactions. These representations allow discrimination between legato and staccato violin sounds as well as [ba] and [pa] phonemes

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