This longitudinal study was aimed at testing the relation between rhythm sensitivity and behavioural and neural orthographic sensitivity in pre-reading stages. Basque-speaking children performed several behavioural and EEG tasks at two time points prior to formal reading acquisition (T1: 4 years old; T2: 5 years old). Neural sensitivity to print was measured via a novel child friendly N170-elicitation paradigm. Our results highlight a transversal and longitudinal relation between rhythm sensitivity and letter name knowledge in pre-reading children. Moreover, they show that children's rhythm sensitivity predicts a significant part of the variance of their N170 response one year later, highlighting the potential of rhythm tasks to predict future orthographic sensitivity in pre-reading stages. Interestingly, the relation between rhythmic skills and print sensitivity was not mediated by the children's phonological short-term memory. Our results provide novel evidence on the importance of rhythm sensitivity for the development of early orthographic sensitivity.

中文翻译：

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同步敲击可预测预读者的脑印敏感性

这项纵向研究旨在测试节奏敏感性与阅读前阶段的行为和神经正字法敏感性之间的关系。巴斯克语儿童在正式阅读之前的两个时间点执行多项行为和 EEG 任务（T1：4 岁；T2：5 岁）。通过一种新颖的儿童友好 N170 启发范式来测量对印刷品的神经敏感性。我们的结果强调了预读儿童节奏敏感性和字母名称知识之间的横向和纵向关系。此外，他们表明，儿童的节奏敏感性在一年后预测了他们 N170 反应方差的很大一部分，突出了节奏任务在预读阶段预测未来拼写敏感性的潜力。有趣的是，节奏技巧和印刷敏感度之间的关系不是由儿童的语音短期记忆介导的。我们的研究结果为节奏敏感性对早期正字法敏感性发展的重要性提供了新的证据。