Is atypical rhythm a risk factor for developmental speech and language disorders?

Abstract

Although a growing literature points to substantial variation in speech/language abilities related to individual differences in musical abilities, mainstream models of communication sciences and disorders have not yet incorporated these individual differences into childhood speech/language development. This article reviews three sources of evidence in a comprehensive body of research aligning with three main themes: (a) associations between musical rhythm and speech/language processing, (b) musical rhythm in children with developmental speech/language disorders and common comorbid attentional and motor disorders, and (c) individual differences in mechanisms underlying rhythm processing in infants and their relationship with later speech/language development. In light of converging evidence on associations between musical rhythm and speech/language processing, we propose the Atypical Rhythm Risk Hypothesis, which posits that individuals with atypical rhythm are at higher risk for developmental speech/language disorders. The hypothesis is framed within the larger epidemiological literature in which recent methodological advances allow for large-scale testing of shared underlying biology across clinically distinct disorders. A series of predictions for future work testing the Atypical Rhythm Risk Hypothesis are outlined. We suggest that if a significant body of evidence is found to support this hypothesis, we can envision new risk factor models that incorporate atypical rhythm to predict the risk of developing speech/language disorders. Given the high prevalence of speech/language disorders in the population and the negative long-term social and economic consequences of gaps in identifying children at-risk, these new lines of research could potentially positively impact access to early identification and treatment.

Does rhythmic priming improve grammatical processing in Hungarian-speaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder?

“…Importantly for our study, several recent studies suggest that rhythm processing is also impaired in DLD (Alcock, Passingham, Watkins & Vargha-Khadem, 2000;Corriveau & Goswami, 2009;Corriveau et al, 2007, Cumming et al, 2015, and this might contribute to the linguistic problems due to the shared underlying mechanisms between rhythm and speech processing discussed above. Weaker rhythm processing in children with DLD is also in line with the Atypical Rhythm Risk Hypothesis that posits that individuals with atypical rhythm are at higher risk for speech/language disorders (Ladányi, Persici, Fiveash, Tillmann & Gordon, 2020). Goswami (2011) proposed the temporal sampling (oscillatory) model, a theory motivated by the Dynamic Attending Theory (Large & Jones, 1999), to account for language problems primarily in children with dyslexia and, by extension, also for DLD.…”

ERP mismatch response to phonological and temporal regularities in speech

“…Once we have acquired the language successfully, this feature may be less relevant to successful speech perception. Given the observations that some developmental language disorders, such as dyslexia, may be associated with impaired sensitivity to syllable stress [10][11][12] , future directions may examine this MMN (in)sensitivity in children and adults with dyslexia. www.nature.com/scientificreports www.nature.com/scientificreports/ ERP responses to formal and temporal deviants both suggest that the probability of occurrence within a language has an impact on how we process speech, with more probable constructions being processed more readily.…”

“…A few studies have found variation in metre to influence semantic 8 and syntactic 9 processing. Furthermore, difficulties in processing the temporal structure of speech have been suggested to underlie phonological processing deficits observed in dyslexia [10][11][12] . It is therefore of interest to study how formal and temporal predictability may interactively influence speech perception.…”

Advances in the Neurocognition of Music and Language

“…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].…”