A new study conducted at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, France, has found that regular musical rhythms can help children with speech and language processing difficulties improve their ability to repeat sentences.
Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a condition that affects around 7% of the population, causing difficulties with speaking and comprehension.
“This finding that regular rhythms can boost sentence repetition is striking, considering that children with developmental language disorder have particular difficulty repeating sentences out loud, especially when they are grammatically complex.” —co-lead author Dr. Anna Fiveash, Western Sydney University’s MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development
A closer look
- The study involved 15 children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and 18 typically-developing children without language-processing difficulties.
- Subjects in the study were French-speaking children between 5 and 13 years old.
- The children listened to music with regular and irregular rhythms for 30 seconds before repeating back sets of six sentences as accurately as they could.
- Researchers used regular rhythms (available here) at 120 beats per minute in 4/4 time so that the listener would feel the beat two times per second.
- Irregular rhythms were made by scrambling the regular rhythms.
Why it matters
The results showed that all children, including those with language problems, could better repeat the sentences after hearing regular musical rhythms.
“Limitations in language processing in children with DLD can result in a struggle to understand their peers, teachers, and parents; making it difficult to efficiently express thoughts, which can lead to lifelong consequences in individuals’ academic and social lives,” —Co-author, Dr. Ladányi, Vanderbilt University Medical Centre
The takeaway
Including regular rhythms in speech therapy is valuable for helping children with language-processing difficulties.
“Effective speech-language therapy is essential to mitigate these consequences to improve developmental outcomes for children, and our latest findings could help supplement and improve current speech therapy guidelines and practices.” —Dr. Ladányi
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