Unpacking the Relationship Between Temporal Structures and Language: An Examination of How Various Rhythmic Tasks Relate to Language Skills

Abstract

The ability to represent time is essential for many aspects of human cognition and is especially critical for how people structure language and speech. Concerning language, people’s ability to represent time relates to prosody (particularly, to the rhythmic aspects of language). Past research has shown a robust connection between people’s rhythmic ability and their language skills; however, the nature of this relationship remains unclear. This unclarity, at least in part, results from the multidimensionality of people’s rhythmic ability. The composite nature of rhythmic ability is evident from the broad variety of different rhythmic tasks that are found in the literature as well as the interindividual variation in people’s performance on them. In order to clarify which aspects of people’s rhythmic ability are related to language skills, in the present study a number of different rhythm tasks as well as a short-term memory task for non-sense sentences were administered. Participants' performance on the various rhythm tasks was used to predict performance on the non-sense sentence repetition task. It was found that the tapping memory task (but none of the various rhythmic production or perception tasks) was able to predict people’s performance on the non-sense repetition task. In this task, participants were asked to tap from memory a sequence of auditorily presented short or long tones. The task showed a variable ability to predict performance depending on the size of the language units that were analyzed. Prediction was better for those units of language that included more rhythmic and temporal information. These findings suggest that the tapping memory task is distinct from the other rhythmic tasks administered in the present study (which either assessed people’s ability to produce or perceive rhythms), and that the tapping memory task assesses a different rhythmical ability – which is here referred to as auditory sequential memory.