ArticleScientific reports2023
Exploring individual differences in musical rhythm and grammar skills in school-aged children with typically developing language.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Musical rhythm abilities and risk for developmental speech-language problems and disorders: epidemiological and polygenic associations.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- The Rhythm Reproduction Task for children: A psychometric examination.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Rhythm Processing Across Development: Origins, Links to Language Processing, and Perspectives for Intervention.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Neural Correlates of Rhythm in Post-Stroke Aphasia.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Rhythmic motor behavior explains individual differences in grammar skills in adults.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Social interaction links active musical rhythm engagement and expressive communication in autistic toddlers.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2024Article
- Heritability of Childhood Music Engagement and Associations with Language and Executive Function: Insights from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.Behavior genetics · 2023Article
- The Association between Music and Language in Children: A State-of-the-Art Review.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Using Motor Tempi to Understand Rhythm and Grammatical Skills in Developmental Language Disorder and Typical Language Development.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
- The Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) Framework for Understanding Musicality-Language Links Across the Lifespan.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2022Review
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Authors and funding
14 authors at 10 institutions in 2 countries.
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Abstract
A growing number of studies have shown a connection between rhythmic processing and language skill. It has been proposed that domain-general rhythm abilities might help children to tap into the rhythm of speech (prosody), cueing them to prosodic markers of grammatical (syntactic) information during language acquisition, thus underlying the observed correlations between rhythm and language. Working memory processes common to task demands for musical rhythm discrimination and spoken language paradigms are another possible source of individual variance observed in musical rhythm and language abilities. To investigate the nature of the relationship between musical rhythm and expressive grammar skills, we adopted an individual differences approach in N = 132 elementary school-aged children ages 5-7, with typical language development, and investigated prosodic perception and working memory skills as possible mediators. Aligning with the literature, musical rhythm was correlated with expressive grammar performance (r = 0.41, p < 0.001). Moreover, musical rhythm predicted mastery of complex syntax items (r = 0.26, p = 0.003), suggesting a privileged role of hierarchical processing shared between musical rhythm processing and children's acquisition of complex syntactic structures. These relationships between rhythm and grammatical skills were not mediated by prosodic perception, working memory, or non-verbal IQ; instead, we uncovered a robust direct effect of musical rhythm perception on grammatical task performance. Future work should focus on possible biological endophenotypes and genetic influences underlying this relationship.
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