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Tracking the beat: unravelling the neural mechanism supporting the rhythm-to-grammar link across development
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Bianca Franzoia1, Matthew O'Connor, Jordi Martorell, Nicola Molinaro, Beatriz de Diego-Lazaro, Ruth de Diego-Balaguer; 1Institute of Neurosciences, Department of Cognition, Development, and Educational Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain., 2Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, IDIBELL, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, Spain., 3Aix-Marseille Université (AMU), Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL) & Institute for Language, Communication and the Brain (ILCB), France., 4BCBL, Basque center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia, Spain, 5Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain, 6Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain, 7ICREA, Barcelona, Spain.
From birth, humans are sensitive to the rhythmic structure of speech (Nazzi et al., 1998). Rhythmicity provides predictive advantages through neural tracking, whereby neural oscillations synchronize with external rhythms and allocate temporal attention to unfolding events (Jones, 1976). Temporal attention is crucial for extracting non-adjacent dependencies (NADs) in speech, characterising grammatical relations (e.g., SHE/ ES, SHE never liES), yet its mechanisms change across development, shifting from stronger reliance on stimulus-driven orienting to more endogenous control (Martinez-Alvarez et al., 2021). In natural speech, prosody constitutes a robust, quasi-rhythmic perceptual cue that temporally correlates with grammatical occurrences (Degano et al., 2024). We hypothesize that neural tracking of prosodic structure may provide an automatic temporal scaffold for extracting NADs in speech, with the involvement of this scaffold changing across development. Recently, we showed that in adult participants beat-inducing rhythmic structure facilitated the learning of NADs in artificial languages (ALs) (Franzoia & De Diego-Balaguer, 2025). Here, we used Electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate whether neural tracking of the rhythmic beat sustains this facilitation across development, assessing adults (N=47, age M=23.3, SD=3.8) and school-age children (N=43, age M=6.96, SD=0.96). Participants were exposed to three ALs varying in rhythmic structure (beat vs. non-beat inducing) and presence vs. absence of NADs. Beat-frequency neural tracking measures (Frequency tagging and Inter-trial phase coherence) were extracted to assess modulations induced when the beat informs NADs. In children, we additionally collected measures of receptive grammar skills, which allowed us to directly assess how neural tracking measures relate to grammar abilities when these are still developing. Children revealed significantly stronger beat-related neural tracking when ALs conveyed rhythmic structure and NADs. In contrast, adults did not show this enhancement in neural tracking when beat and NADs were jointly manipulated. Crucially, in children, inter-individual variability in neural tracking at the beat frequency was significantly associated with receptive grammar skills. These findings provide neural evidence that temporal predictability, sustained by neural tracking of rhythmic regularities, supports the detection of grammar-like rules in children, likely paralleling the facilitating role of prosodic regularities signalling syntactic structure in natural speech. Importantly, our results provide the first evidence that neural tracking of the beat in speech-like streams is directly associated with grammar abilities in children. The absence of a comparable modulation in adults resonates with the substantial developmental change that the attentional mechanisms supporting grammar extraction undergo, with adults relying more strongly on endogenous control, which may not have been grasped by the neural tracking measures addressed here (Mueller et al., 2019). Since the control mechanisms supporting temporal orienting continue to develop throughout childhood (Martinez-Alvarez et al., 2021), our findings may reflect a developmental shift to the extent to which learners rely on external rhythmic cues to track non-adjacent dependencies. Future studies assessing younger children and infants will be critical for testing this interpretation.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Prosody