How rhythm helps kids learn to read

Rhythm and Reading

In a ground-breaking article on how infants process speech, Cambridge professor, Dr. Usha Goswami argues that “. . . entrainment to metrical structure is core to linguistic as well as musical human behavior.” (1)

What’s entrainment?

Have you ever listened to music and started tapping your feet to its beat? Have you ever felt a melody moving your body to dance? Then, you’ve experienced “entrainment.” Entrainment occurs when an external source causes something (or someone) to synchronize to its rhythm. Because music makes you move to its beat, we can say it’s entraining your body to “get down” to the sounds.

But what does entrainment have to do with how babies process (or make sense of) speech sounds?

Everything! Goswami’s pioneering research reveals that infants align their minds with rhythmic or metrical qualities inherent in syllabic structures, such as ‘da, de, di, do’. Rhythm entrains our bodies to music, and rhythm entrains a baby’s brain waves to speech. Infants “tune in” to words by aligning the rhythmic frequency of their brain waves to the underlying syllabic “beat” that gives speech lyrical qualities. Babies process speech sounds by learning to segment them into rhythmic syllable structures. Infant brains love rhythm and tune into “linguistic,” or speech patterns filled with amplified and exaggerated syllable sounds. Remember “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum?’ Chances are that’s all you remember from Jack and the Beanstalk.

But Goswami goes further than explaining how babies process speech. She theorizes that since babies learn rhythmically, the best way to remediate toddlers struggling with reading is to merge language learning with musical rhythm.

She writes, “The core role of entrainment in efficient speech processing suggests that language difficulties in childhood may benefit from music-based remediation that focuses on multi-modal rhythmic entrainment. Alignment of linguistic and musical metrical structure seems likely to be fundamental to successful remediation.”

In other words, mixing music with syllabic and phonemic structures helps early learners develop phonological awareness, the crucial foundation for learning to read. In other words, rhythm helps kids learn to read.

Takeaway:

Parents, caregivers, and preschool teachers should immerse babies and toddlers in a sea of syllables and songs as early and often as possible.

We recommend using Sylla-Bear, an adorable, syllable-singing teddy bear, as a literacy coach for home and school.

Learn more about Sylla-Bear here.

USHA GOSWAMI [1] Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge