Association between recovering from tempo perturbations and reading measurements

Abstract

AbstractA strong correlation between auditory temporal processing and reading proficiency has been consistently observed across clinical and nonclinical populations, spanning various age groups and languages. Specifically, rhythm sensitivity in both the music and speech domains has been considered to be fundamental for accurately tracking the hierarchical acoustic components in speech, playing a central role in the development of reading skills. However, the empirical validation of this hypothesis has primarily utilized stimuli with an isochronous underlying beat structure, which is limited in its ability to capture the nonlinearity inherent in the perception of timing within the speech and music domains. In our current study, we introduced perturbation stimuli and demonstrated a relationship between sensorimotor synchronization performance and reading measurements in the neurotypical adult population. Specifically, the current study highlighted that sensorimotor synchronization during the post-perturbation time window yields notably superior predictive value across a wide array of reading measurements when compared to the pre-perturbation time window, which, in contrast, did not predict reading measurements. Furthermore, our novel curve fitting analysis effectively captured the nonlinear aspects of participants’ sensorimotor synchronization performance when recovering from tempo perturbation, providing further insight into their auditory temporal processing abilities when responding to timing changes in auditory signals—a phenomenon commonly encountered in both speech and music contexts.