Figure 2.

Rhythm production ability and early literacy skills. Convergent evidence across data acquired with various methods, in support of associations between rhythm skills and language in preschool‐aged children (Reprinted with permission from Woodruff Carr, White‐Schwoch, Tierney, Strait, and Kraus (2014)). Children that performed well on a musical beat synchronization task (here called synchronizers, in red, shown on the rose plots on left to have better drumming accuracy) encoded speech more efficiently (top right) and show significantly better phonological awareness than their non‐synchronizer peers (bottom right). Synchronizers also performed better on a sentence repetition task (it is important to note that sentence repetition/imitation tasks not only require auditory perception and short‐term memory but also reflect deeper access to the grammatical structure of language: see Klem et al., 2015)