Grammar For Adults Pdf

[Silvina Spindler]

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Rhythm is pervasive in a myriad of auditory events including music, language, and everyday listening sounds. Importantly, in the language domain, rhythmicity in continuous speech signals provides potent cues for tracking ongoing syntactic structures1,2. While previous theoretical frameworks situate language as a highly specialized faculty distinct from music3,4, a growing body of evidence demonstrates the relationship between musical rhythm and linguistic syntax5,6,7,8. For example, the ability to discriminate between pairs of short musical rhythms was positively associated with both receptive6,8 and expressive5,7 grammar proficiencies in typically developing children. Such rhythm-grammar connection may suggest co-optation of neurobiological resources shared by music and language9.

A core neuroanatomical substrate supporting rhythm processing is the sensorimotor system consisting of the basal ganglia, supplementary motor area, premotor cortex, and cerebellum. Indeed, synchronizing movements to musical rhythms is ubiquitous in human behaviors; listening to music often makes us spontaneously move to its rhythm. The sensorimotor brain regions are activated not only by rhythm production10,11,12, but also by passively listening to musical rhythms13,14,15. In particular, the basal ganglia and supplementary motor area have been shown to be sensitive to temporal regularity of musical rhythms that induces a sense of beat16,17,18,19. As such, it has been proposed that the motor circuitries connecting the basal ganglia to supplementary motor area support rhythm and beat perception by implicitly generating periodic actions towards upcoming beat timings20.

Given the crucial involvement of the sensorimotor system in rhythm perception, the motor component of rhythm processing may also explain individual differences in following rule-based temporal dynamics in the language domain, i.e., syntax. However, there are only a few studies that examined both beat synchronization and grammar skills in children21,22. In addition, although there are large individual differences in both motoric and perceptual rhythm skills in adults23,24 as well as in children25, whether such differences can be translated to grammar skills in the adult population remains elusive. In the present study, we addressed this issue by measuring multiple rhythm and grammar skills in a large sample of healthy young adults.

Overview of the experimental procedures. (A) Example sentences in grammaticality judgment task. Participants indicate if each spoken sentence is grammatically correct or not. Half of the sentences contain a subject-verb agreement (SVA) error or a past tense error. The relative clause is underlined, and the syntactic error is shown as italic in the parenthesis. (B) Example sentences in sentence comprehension task. Participants indicate the gender of individuals linked to an action verb, but not to four pre-designated preference verbs (love, adore, hate, and dislike), on each spoken sentence presented with or without a multi-talker babble noise. The relative clause is underlined, and the target action verb is in bold. (C) Schematic representation of rhythm sequences in rhythm discrimination task. Participants listen to each pair of rhythms and indicate if they were the same or different. (D) Spontaneous tapping task. Participants are instructed to tap consistently at their own tempo without external metronomes. (E) Auditory beat tapping task. Participants tap along with metronome beats presented in one of four tempos (inter-beat intervals of 500, 750, 1125, or 1687 ms) (synchronization phase) and continue tapping after the metronome stops (continuation phase). (F) Schematic representation of auditory sequence in letter-number sequencing task. Participants listen to a sequence of alternating letters and numbers and repeat them back in a sorted order. (G) Each participant completes the six behavioral tasks in one of the two orders shown. See Methods for more details.

Although a growing body of research has demonstrated connections between musical rhythm and linguistic grammar skills5,6,7,8, the evidence has been limited in children and mostly to a perceptual rhythm skill, i.e., musical rhythm discrimination. In the present study with 150 healthy young adults, we demonstrated that a set of rhythm skills in both receptive and expressive domains were associated with receptive grammar tasks. Notably, even simple and repetitive motor behavior involving spontaneous or synchronized finger tapping was predictive of comprehension on spoken sentences that varied in syntactic structure. This finding extends the existing evidence beyond the perceptual rhythm toward expressive/motoric rhythm skills, as well as from children to young adults. Together, these results suggest that common neurobiological mechanisms may be at play in both rhythm and syntactic processing9, contributing to the association between individual differences in rhythm and grammar that persists into adulthood.

The present findings may shed light on the role of the motor system in auditory syntactic processing37, by showing that even a relatively simple motor task such as spontaneous or continued finger tapping explained both grammaticality judgment and syntactic interpretation on spoken sentences. Spontaneous rhythmic behavior has been theorized to reflect activity of self-sustaining internal oscillators27,28, which is likely regulated by cortico-striatal motor circuits38,39. Our data speak to the functional role of internal rhythmicity in readily analyzing syntactic structures during auditory sentence processing. In addition, beat synchronization tapping had a robust explanatory power in predicting sentence comprehension performance, which was significant even when controlling for the effects of the other rhythm measures. Given that sensorimotor synchronization to external rhythm is thought to rely on predictive timing mechanisms26,40, the current finding supports the idea that temporal prediction (e.g., when the next event occurs) may play a functional role in syntactic prediction (e.g., what word comes next given the preceding words in a sentence)37,41.

By contrast, the synchronized tapping measurements had a less robust relationship with grammaticality judgement performance, suggesting that this task may require some different mechanisms that cannot be solely explained by (forward) temporal prediction, such as (backward) re-analysis of preceding syntactic contents42,43. The re-analysis of temporal structure may have been captured by the significant relationship between rhythm discrimination and grammaticality judgment. This is perhaps because both tasks require back-and-forth comparison of words or tones in relation to the preceding ones to achieve timely judgement of the linguistic or rhythmic structure. This finding is in line with the idea that musical rhythm processing may recruit neurobiological resources for rule-based temporal processing shared by syntax processing system9.

Together, the current results suggest that different rhythm skills may uniquely contribute to accounting for different grammar skills. This underscores the importance of assessing multiple rhythm skills to gain a more complete picture of the rhythm-grammar relationship, which may be manifested through multiple neurocognitive mechanisms such as precise temporal predictions and re-analysis of temporal structures. Moreover, from a broader perspective, our findings suggest that the relationship between music and language may not be a unitary construct, but rather a consequence of multiple mechanisms shared by different aspects of music and language. For instance, phonological processing may be correlated more dominantly with components of rhythm processing that tap into precise auditory encoding44,45. Thus, future investigation of a wide range of music and language tasks using a well-powered sample may provide a more comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted associations between music and language.

In sum, the current study provides evidence for the association between expressive rhythm skills and receptive grammar skills in an adult population. This is in line with clinical observations that children with developmental language disorder often exhibit deficits in producing rhythmic movements46, which might build upon common genetic underpinnings47,48. Moreover, we found different rhythm skills uniquely explained different grammar skills, suggesting that there are dissociable aspects of temporal processing in the rhythm-grammar relationship. Our findings suggest that what has been regarded as a core linguistic operation, i.e., syntax, is associated with domain-general temporal processing in the sensorimotor system.

The experiment consisted of the following behavioral tasks: two for grammar (grammaticality judgment, sentence comprehension); three for rhythm (rhythm discrimination, spontaneous tapping, auditory beat tapping); one for verbal working memory (letter-number sequencing) (Figs. 1, 2). Each participant completed the tasks in either of two fixed orders, as shown in Fig. 1G. The experimental procedures were conducted using Matlab R2021 (Mathworks, MA) in a dimly lit sound-proof booth. All auditory stimuli were presented at a preset volume (70 dB SPL) through Sennheiser HD-280 headphones. We used Google Text-to-Speech to generate spoken sentence stimuli for the grammar tasks and verbal items for the working memory task. The speaker voice was set to an American-English speaking male for the language tasks and a female for the working memory task.

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