Regular rhythmic primes improve sentence repetition in children with developmental language disorder

Abstract

Recently reported links between rhythm and grammar processing have opened new perspectives for using rhythm in clinical interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Previous research using the rhythmic priming paradigm has shown improved performance on language tasks after regular rhythmic primes compared to control conditions. However, this research has been limited to effects of rhythmic priming on grammaticality judgments. The current study investigated whether regular rhythmic primes could also benefit sentence repetition, a task requiring proficiency in complex syntax—an area of difficultly for children with DLD. Regular rhythmic primes improved sentence repetition performance compared to irregular rhythmic primes in children with DLD and with typical development—an effect that did not occur with a non-linguistic control task. These findings suggest processing overlap for musical rhythm and linguistic syntax, with implications for the use of rhythmic stimulation for treatment of children with DLD in clinical research and practice.

Situating language and music research in a domain‐specific versus domain‐general framework: A review of theoretical and empirical data

“…Rhythmic priming using short musical excerpts that had strong regular, metric structures has been found beneficial for school-aged children's grammaticality judgements on subsequently presented, naturally spoken sentences (not metrically matched to the musical primes) both in typically developing children and in children with DLD and DD (Bedoin et al, 2016;Chern et al, 2018;Przybylski et al, 2013). Α similar effect has been found for sentence repetition in DLD children (Fiveash et al, 2023). Children with cochlear implants seem to have benefitted more strongly from a short intervention programme targeting syntactic comprehension when these were interleaved by rhythmic (vs. non-rhythmic) primes within each therapy session, thus providing some first evidence for rhythmic non-linguistic interventions (Bedoin et al, 2018).…”

Interpreting Rhythm as Parsing: Syntactic‐Processing Operations Predict the Migration of Visual Flashes as Perceived During Listening to Musical Rhythms

“…The theoretical framework presented here is largely independent of whether the hypothesized computational and algorithmic features shared by linguistic and musical processing are implemented by the same neural resources. In particular, although rhythmic regularity has been shown to interfere with linguistic syntactic processing (Fiveash et al., 2023; Jung, Sontag, Park, & Loui, 2015), it is also plausible that a domain‐general rhythm‐processing system would be shared between music and linguistic prosody rather than or alongside linguistic syntax. However, the perspective proposed in this study may also contribute to the study of implementational analogies between language and music.…”