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The effects of rhythm priming on syntactic language processing in children
Poster B34 in Poster Session B and Reception, Thursday, October 6, 6:30 - 8:30 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Hyun-Woong Kim1, Katie Ginter1, Yune S Lee1; 1School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas
Introduction: Previous studies have demonstrated a phenomenon called ‘rhythm priming,’ in which listening to a regular rhythm sequence results in improved grammar performance on spoken sentences in typically developing children (Chern et al., 2018) and those with developmental language disorders (Bedoin et al., 2016; Ladányi et al., 2021; Przybylski et al., 2013). The present behavioral study sought to replicate and extend the ‘rhythm priming’ effects using auditory language tasks involving either morphosyntactic or syntactic re-analysis skills, respectively. Methods: 17 typically developing children aged 7-12 years (mean=8.8 years, 5 females) participated in the study. The grammaticality judgment test (GJT) required participants to indicate whether each spoken sentence was grammatically correct or not. The sentence materials were previously used in Chern et al. (2018), and each sentence contained either a past tense or a subject-verb agreement error. In the syntactic re-analysis test (SRT), participants were presented with sentences with center-embedded subject-relative (SR) (e.g., “The boy that reaches the girl is small”) or object-relative (OR) (e.g., “The boy that reaches the girl is small”) clauses and were asked to indicate the gender of the agent. The auditory sentence stimuli were created using Google Text-to-Speech. Each task consisted of 6 blocks. For each block, participants were primed with either a 32 s regular or irregular rhythm sequence followed by 6 (in GJT) or 8 (in SRT) task trials. Regular and irregular rhythm primes were alternated between blocks. Results: Task accuracy on GJT was not different between regular and irregular rhythm priming conditions. In SRT, task accuracy was significantly higher in SR than OR sentences, indicating that participants had more difficulty analyzing the OR structure. Intriguingly, the accuracy on OR sentences was significantly higher in the irregular than in the regular priming condition, contradicting the previous regular rhythm priming effect. Conclusion: While we did not find syntactic facilitation in response to regular rhythm priming in the morphosyntactic tasks, we found that irregular rhythm priming resulted in improved syntactic re-analysis. Follow-up studies are currently underway by replacing the synthetic google speech with natural human voice to resolve the discrepancy and somewhat paradoxical rhythm priming effects observed in the current study.
Topic Areas: Language Therapy, Development