Rhythm discrimination and metronome tapping in 4-year-old children at risk for developmental dyslexia

Temporally accurate perception and production of rhythmic patterns are key factors related to language development and reading acquisition. Here we investigate rhythm discrimination and rhythm production in children who are at family risk or not at family risk for dyslexia, to compare group performance in these tasks prior to the start of reading instruction and to investigate the relation between individual children’s rhythmic abilities and pre-reading skills. Four-year-old children completed a rhythm discrimination task and a rhythm production task, both utilizing a temporal rate of 2 Hz, and also received pre-reading measures of non-word repetition, vocabulary, and letter knowledge. Controls outperformed at-risk children in the rhythm discrimination task and in the pre-reading measures. No group differences were observed in the rhythm production task, but individual differences in this task were related to scores of non-word repetition, vocabulary size, and letter knowledge. The data are discussed in terms of Temporal Sampling theory (Goswami, 2011).