No influence of regular rhythmic priming on grammaticality judgment and sentence comprehension in English-speaking children

A growing body of research has demonstrated the association between music and language, particularly between rhythm and grammar skills in children. A compelling piece of evidence for the influence of music on language comes from findings that a brief exposure to regular musical rhythm improved subsequent syntactic language performance in children. Nevertheless, those observations were made on one particular task, i.e., grammaticality judgment, mostly with French-speaking children. Here, we sought to corroborate and extend the rhythmic priming effect with English-speaking children aged 7 to 12 years who underwent two different syntactic tasks on spoken sentences: one involving judgment on morphosyntactic well-formedness (grammaticality judgment) and the other requiring noun-verb relation analysis (sentence comprehension), both following either regular or irregular rhythmic priming. Half of the children were administered synthetic speech stimuli (Experiment 1), and the other half were presented with natural speech (Experiment 2). Across the two experiments, we did not find any rhythmic priming effect; children's performance on both the grammaticality judgment and sentence comprehension tasks was comparable irrespective of the regularity in prior rhythms. These results imply that the positive influence of regular rhythmic priming on syntactic processing may be confined to specific language or age populations, warranting further investigation.

New evidence of a rhythmic priming effect that enhances grammaticality judgments in children

Musical rhythm and the grammatical structure of language share a surprising number of characteristics that may be intrinsically related in child development. The current study aimed to understand the potential influence of musical rhythmic priming on subsequent spoken grammar task performance in children with typical development who were native speakers of English. Participants (ages 5-8 years) listened to rhythmically regular and irregular musical sequences (within-participants design) followed by blocks of grammatically correct and incorrect sentences upon which they were asked to perform a grammaticality judgment task. Rhythmically regular musical sequences improved performance in grammaticality judgment compared with rhythmically irregular musical sequences. No such effect of rhythmic priming was found in two nonlinguistic control tasks, suggesting a neural overlap between rhythm processing and mechanisms recruited during grammar processing. These findings build on previous research investigating the effect of rhythmic priming by extending the paradigm to a different language, testing a younger population, and employing nonlanguage control tasks. These findings of an immediate influence of rhythm on grammar states (temporarily augmented grammaticality judgment performance) also converge with previous findings of associations between rhythm and grammar traits (stable generalized grammar abilities) in children. Taken together, the results of this study provide additional evidence for shared neural processing for language and music and warrant future investigations of potentially beneficial effects of innovative musical material on language processing.