Abstract
Children with developmental language disorders have been shown to be also impaired in rhythm and meter perception. Temporal processing and its link to language processing can be understood within the dynamic attending theory. An external stimulus can stimulate internal oscillators, which orient attention over time and drive speech signal segmentation to provide benefits for syntax processing, which is impaired in various patient populations. For children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and dyslexia, previous research has shown the influence of an external rhythmic stimulation on subsequent language processing by comparing the influence of a temporally regular musical prime to that of a temporally irregular prime. Here we tested whether the observed rhythmic stimulation effect is indeed due to a benefit provided by the regular musical prime (rather than a cost subsequent to the temporally irregular prime). Sixteen children with SLI and 16 age-matched controls listened to either a regular musical prime sequence or an environmental sound scene (without temporal regularities in event occurrence; i.e., referred to as “baseline condition”) followed by grammatically correct and incorrect sentences. They were required to perform grammaticality judgments for each auditorily presented sentence. Results revealed that performance for the grammaticality judgments was better after the regular prime sequences than after the baseline sequences. Our findings are interpreted in the theoretical framework of the dynamic attending theory (Jones, 1976) and the temporal sampling (oscillatory) framework for developmental language disorders (Goswami, 2011). Furthermore, they encourage the use of rhythmic structures (even in non-verbal materials) to boost linguistic structure processing and outline perspectives for rehabilitation.
Highlights
The role of rhythm in speech processing as well as in language rehabilitation has attracted increased interest (e.g., Fujii and Wan, 2014)
These analyses are based on Hits and False Alarms FAs after regular and baseline primes, respectively2. d’ is defined as z(Hits) – z(FAs), and response bias c as −0.5 (z(Hits) ∗ z(FAs)); see (Macmillan and Creelman, 1991) for more details. d’ and c were analyzed by ANOVAs with prime as within-participant factor and group (SLI children, controls) as between-participants factor
We here introduced the necessary baseline condition to investigate whether the observed rhythmic stimulation effect is due to a benefit provided by the regular musical prime
Summary
The role of rhythm in speech processing as well as in language rehabilitation has attracted increased interest (e.g., Fujii and Wan, 2014). Impaired rhythm and meter processing has been reported in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; Weinert, 1992; Corriveau and Goswami, 2009) and in dyslexic children (Overy et al, 2003; Muneaux et al, 2004). Dyslexic children’s performance in beat perception predicted word and non-word reading as well as phonological awareness (Muneaux et al, 2004). Congruent findings had been previously reported by Overy et al (2003) asking dyslexic children to tap to the rhythm of a song (i.e., Happy Birthday), which is a form of syllable segmentation and reflects a type of phonological awareness that is of major importance for acquiring skilled reading
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