Research report Music, rhythm, rise time perception and developmental dyslexia: Perception of musical meter predicts reading and phonology Martina Huss, John P. Verney, Tim Fosker, Natasha Mead and Usha Goswami* Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge, U.K. article info Article history: Received 19 August 2009 Reviewed 5 October 2009 Revised 11 January 2010 Accepted 26 May 2010 Action editor J-F Demonet Published online 5 August 2010 Keywords: Dyslexia Music Rhythm Phonology Reading abstract Introduction: Rhythm organises musical events into patterns and forms, and rhythm perception in music is usually studied by using metrical tasks. Metrical structure also plays an organisational function in the phonology of language, via speech prosody, and there is evidence for rhythmic perceptual difficulties in developmental dyslexia. Here we investi- gate the hypothesis that the accurate perception of musical metrical structure is related to basic auditory perception of rise time, and also to phonological and literacy development in children. Methods: A battery of behavioural tasks was devised to explore relations between musical metrical perception, auditory perception of amplitude envelope structure, phonological awareness (PA) and reading in a sample of 64 typically-developing children and children with developmental dyslexia. Results: We show that individual differences in the perception of amplitude envelope rise time are linked to musical metrical sensitivity, and that musical metrical sensitivity predicts PA and reading development, accounting for over 60% of variance in reading along with age and I.Q. Even the simplest metrical task, based on a duple metrical structure, was performed significantly more poorly by the children with dyslexia. Conclusions: The accurate perception of metrical structure may be critical for phonological development and consequently for the development of literacy. Difficulties in metrical processing are associated with basic auditory rise time processing difficulties, suggesting a primary sensory impairment in developmental dyslexia in tracking the lower-frequency modulations in the speech envelope. ª 2010 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved. Metrical perception is important for both speech and music. Both music and speech unfold in time, and the rhythm or periodicity with which strong and weak beats recur is central to the sequential organisation of sounds in both domains. This is referred to as meter in music and as syllable stress in speech. In music the place and role of different notes in the overall sequential pattern are important, with both rhythm and pitch acting as “musical syntax” (Thaut, 2005). This is analogous to prosodic structure in language, which has been described as a “phonological grammar” (Port, 2003). Both * Corresponding author. Centre for Neuroscience in Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ, U.K. E-mail address: ucg10@cam.ac.uk (U. Goswami). available at www.sciencedirect.com journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex cortex 47 (2011) 674 e689 0010-9452/$ e see front matter ª 2010 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2010.07.010