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

Abstract

Musical rhythm and the grammatical structure of language share a surprising number of characteristics that may be intrinsically related in child development. The present 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 to 8 years) listened to rhythmically regular and irregular musical sequences (within-subjects 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 to rhythmically irregular musical sequences. No such effect of rhythmic priming was found in two non-linguistic 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 non-language 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, this study provides additional evidence for shared neural processing for language and music, and warrants future investigations of potentially beneficial effects of innovative musical material on language processing.