The ability to tap to a beat relates to cognitive, linguistic, and perceptual skills
Tierney, Adam and Kraus, N. (2013) The ability to tap to a beat relates to cognitive, linguistic, and perceptual skills. Brain and Language 124 (3), pp. 225-231. ISSN 0093-934X.
Abstract
Reading-impaired children have difficulty tapping to a beat. Here we tested whether this relationship between reading ability and synchronized tapping holds in typically-developing adolescents. We also hypothesized that tapping relates to two other abilities. First, since auditory-motor synchronization requires monitoring of the relationship between motor output and auditory input, we predicted that subjects better able to tap to the beat would perform better on attention tests. Second, since auditory-motor synchronization requires fine temporal precision within the auditory system for the extraction of a sound’s onset time, we predicted that subjects better able to tap to the beat would be less affected by backward masking, a measure of temporal precision within the auditory system. As predicted, tapping performance related to reading, attention, and backward masking. These results motivate future research investigating whether beat synchronization training can improve not only reading ability, but potentially executive function and auditory processing as well.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
Date Deposited: | 17 Dec 2015 10:15 |
Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:20 |
URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/13793 |
Statistics
Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.