Rhythmic timing and dyslexia: A causal connection?

How well children will learn to read is determined in part by their phonological awareness. Phonological awareness refers to the child’s awareness of the sound structure of their spoken language. It develops at different linguistic levels. The first level is that of the syllable (win-dow, pop-si-cle). The second level is that of the onset/rime (w-in, p-op, sw-eet, spr-ing). The final level is that of the phoneme (w-I-n, s-w-E-t).

This project was based on the assumption that individual differences in phonological awareness must depend to some extent on the basic auditory processes that extract words from speech. A range of auditory processing measures were administered to a group of 69 children at two time points 2 years apart. Individual differences in basic auditory processing of rise time and frequency were found to be the strongest predictors of phonological development and literacy. Non-linguistic measures of rhythmic ability (eg, tapping in time with an external beat) were also found to be predictors of language and literacy. The data are interpreted with respect to the accurate neural representation of the speech envelope, with consequent effects for prosodic perception and the development of phonological representations.