Rhythm's role in reading
It's all in the rhythm if you are learning to read, it seems, with UK scientists publishing findings this week that children with dyslexia have difficulty hearing rhythms in language.
Researchers from the University College, London, have found that dyslexic children are significantly less sensitive than most readers to rhythmic beats in non-speech sounds.
The results appear in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"I wouldn't say it's groundbreaking, but it is certainly important objective information in that area," said Dr Greg Robinson, from the School of Education at the University of Newcastle.
"It's assessing phonetic awareness in a slightly different way, and just verifying that onset and rime [rhyme] are important in developing reading skills."
In order for to make sense of a stream of speech, we segment the incoming sound into individual sounds. Words are composed of two sections. In the word 'man', for example, the 'm' is the onset and the 'an' is the rime (the part that rhymes with 'can' or 'pan').
Despite the common perception that dyslexia involves difficulty in keeping words still on a page, this is the specific problem for only 20 per cent of sufferers. For another 30 per cent, the problem is sound segmentation. The remainder have a mixture of both visual and aural problems.
Children generally learn how to hear sound segments automatically, but those with dyslexia have problems segmenting the speech stream into the individual sounds.
The researchers propose that beat detection is important for processing speech at the level of the syllable. Problems with sound segmentation in dyslexia, they argue, are a secondary consequence of the more fundamental inability to follow rhythms in speech and non-speech sounds.
They used a battery of auditory and linguistic tests to determine the relationship between a child's skill at beat detection and their reading and spelling ability, comparing dyslexic children to normal and precocious readers.
Dr Paul Whiting, president of Specific Learning Difficulties Association (SPELD) of New South Wales, said this research builds on work undertaken by Harvard researchers in 1994, who dissected the brains of people who had had dyslexia and found differences in their auditory pathways.
"This study tells us why that is important, it reinforces their work with harder scientific evidence," he said.
Turn that music up!
The link between music and reading is not new. In the 1970s, it was established that teaching music fundamentals was groundwork for improved literacy, said Dr Whiting, but at that time there was no hard scientific evidence as to why these children were better at literacy.
"This article takes us closer to saying why that's true," he said.
Music, rhythm games and poetry should be part of all kindergarten curricula, according to Dr Whiting, who considers that preschools offering literacy programs are jumping the gun.
"All kids should be assessed for balance, rhythm perception and posture," he said, adding that this can be easily achieved by watching children dance to music. Any problems can be addressed in the curriculum.