1 Proposed journal section: cognitive neuroscience Individual differences in neural markers of beat processing predict spoken grammar skills in six-year-old children Valentina Persici 1,2,3,4 , Scott Blain 5 , John R. Iversen 6 , Alexandra P. Key 7,8,1 , Sonja A. Kotz 9,10 , J. Devin McAuley 11 , & Reyna L. Gordon 3,12,1,8 1 Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA 2 Department of Psychology, University of Milano – Bicocca, Milan, Italy 3 Department of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA 4 Department of Human Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy 5 Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA 6 Institute for Neural Computation, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA 7 Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA 8 Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, USA 9 Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands 10 Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany 11 Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA 12 Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA Corresponding authors: Valentina Persici, Department of Human Sciences, University of Verona, 17 Lungadige Porta Vittoria, Verona, 37129, Italy, valentina.persici@univr.it