Rhythm production at school entry as a predictor of poor reading and spelling at the end of first grade

Abstract

Rhythm plays an organisational role in the prosody and phonology of language, and children with literacy difficulties have been found to demonstrate poor rhythmic perception. This study explored whether students’ performance on a simple rhythm task at school entry could serve as a predictor of whether they would face difficulties in word reading and spelling at the end of grade 1. The participants were 479 Norwegian 6-year-old first graders randomized as controls in the longitudinal RCT on track (n = 1171). Rhythmic timing and pre-reading skills were tested individually at school entry on a digital tablet. On the rhythm task, the students were told to tap a drum appearing on the screen to two different rhythms (2 Hz paced and 1.5 Hz paced). Children’s responses were recorded as they tapped on the screen with their index finger. Significant group differences were found in rhythm tapping ability measured at school entry, when groups were defined upon whether children went on to score above or below the 20th percentile reading and spelling thresholds in national assessment tests at the end of grade one. Inclusion of the school-entry rhythmic tapping measure into a model of classification accuracy for above or below threshold reading and spelling improved accuracy of classification by 6.2 and 9.2% respectively. Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11145-017-9782-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Cognitive Processes Underlying Reading Improvement during a Rhythm-Based Intervention. A Small-Scale Investigation of Italian Children with Dyslexia

“…Consistent with research identifying rhythm processing as a predictor of reading proficiency [7,23,34,35], we observed a relationship between baseline rhythm discrimination ability and baseline reading speed in our sample. Of the cognitive abilities assessed, only rhythm discrimination was correlated with reading performance; neither attentional abilities nor verbal short-term or working memory were related to reading.…”

Screening for Slow Reading Acquisition in Norway and Finland – a Quest for Context Specific Predictors

“…When it comes to PA, the stop criterion used in the Norwegian tasks (a test was discontinued if the student made two subsequent errors) could have contributed to lower scores for the Norwegian studentsbut as the items increased in difficulty it seems unlikely that students who made two errors in a row would have answered the next item(s) correctly and so would have obtained a higher score without that criterion. Further, the phoneme-blending tasks differed between the samples, but a previous study from a Norwegian context, in which the phoneme-blending task used was similar to the one administered in the Finnish sample in the present study, also found first-phoneme isolation, but not phoneme blending, measured at school entry to be a unique predictor of poor reading later on (Lundetrae & Thomson, 2017). Finally, as the Finnish students outscored the Norwegian ones across all pre-reading and reading measures at school entry (letter knowledge, first-phoneme isolation, phoneme blending, and word-reading accuracy), we feel confident that the results from this study reflect real differences in skill level between Norwegian and Finnish school beginners.…”

“…In the case of alphabetic writing systems, learning to read requires students to match graphemes to phonemes; hence the ability to perceive phonemes as (individual and) separate speech sounds is particularly strongly associated with reading success. To capture this aspect of PA, both phoneme-isolation and phoneme-blending tasks have been used for longitudinal prediction of word-reading ability (see e.g., Caravolas et al, 2013;Lundetrae & Thomson, 2017;Torppa et al, 2016). It is important to note that these two task types differ in the kind of awareness required: only implicit awareness is needed to identify the first or last sound of a word, but more explicit awareness is required to blend individual sounds into a spoken word (Kirby et al, 2008).…”

“…This might be especially relevant in transparent orthographies, which make it easy to learn how to read accurately at a young age, even without formal instruction (Seymour et al, 2003). Finally, another factor that has been found to increase the likelihood of developing RD is having close relatives with a history of RD (Eklund et al, 2015;Lundetrae & Thomson, 2017;Torppa et al, 2011).…”

La Música como promotora de habilidades fonológicas: un estudio exploratorio con niños preescolares uruguayos

“…Al mismo tiempo, se observa que el desarrollo de habilidades rítmicas, en la estructuración de actividades musicales ha estado menos presente, aun cuando se ha sugerido que la percepción del ritmo del habla facilita el reconocimiento de la palabra hablada y el desarrollo del vocabulario en los niños, promoviendo el desarrollo de la CF (Holliman, Wood, & Sheehy, 2010;Wood, Wade-Woolley, & Holliman, 2009). En efecto, niños que presentan bajos niveles de CF, o que presentan dificultades en el proceso de adquisición de la lectura también presentan dificultades en las habilidades rítmicas y de sincronización en tareas musicales (Goswami, 2012b;Goswami, Wang, Cruz, Fosker, Mead, & Huss, 2010;Flaugnacco et al, 2014;Lundetrae & Thomson, 2018;Moritz et al, 2013;Tierney & Kraus, 2013;Tierney, White-Schwoch, MacLean, & Kraus, 2017;Thomson, Huss & Goswami, 2006).…”