Dataset Information

New evidence of a rhythmic priming effect that enhances grammaticality judgments in children.

ABSTRACT: Musical rhythm and the grammatical structure of language share a surprising number of characteristics that may be intrinsically related in child development. The current study aimed to understand the potential influence of musical rhythmic priming on subsequent spoken grammar task performance in children with typical development who were native speakers of English. Participants (ages 5-8?years) listened to rhythmically regular and irregular musical sequences (within-participants design) followed by blocks of grammatically correct and incorrect sentences upon which they were asked to perform a grammaticality judgment task. Rhythmically regular musical sequences improved performance in grammaticality judgment compared with rhythmically irregular musical sequences. No such effect of rhythmic priming was found in two nonlinguistic control tasks, suggesting a neural overlap between rhythm processing and mechanisms recruited during grammar processing. These findings build on previous research investigating the effect of rhythmic priming by extending the paradigm to a different language, testing a younger population, and employing nonlanguage control tasks. These findings of an immediate influence of rhythm on grammar states (temporarily augmented grammaticality judgment performance) also converge with previous findings of associations between rhythm and grammar traits (stable generalized grammar abilities) in children. Taken together, the results of this study provide additional evidence for shared neural processing for language and music and warrant future investigations of potentially beneficial effects of innovative musical material on language processing.

SUBMITTER: Chern A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5986615 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

New evidence of a rhythmic priming effect that enhances grammaticality judgments in children.

Chern Alexander A Tillmann Barbara B Vaughan Chloe C Gordon Reyna L RL

Journal of experimental child psychology 20180516

Musical rhythm and the grammatical structure of language share a surprising number of characteristics that may be intrinsically related in child development. The current study aimed to understand the potential influence of musical rhythmic priming on subsequent spoken grammar task performance in children with typical development who were native speakers of English. Participants (ages 5-8 years) listened to rhythmically regular and irregular musical sequences (within-participants design) followed ...[more]

PMID: 29778278

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundBone marrow derived endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are immature endothelial cells (ECs) involved in neo-angiogenesis and endothelial homeostasis and are considered as a circulating reservoir for endothelial repair. Many studies showed that EPCs from patients with cardiovascular pathologies are impaired and insufficient; hence, allogenic sources of EPCs from adult or cord blood are considered as good choices for cell therapy applications. However, allogenic condition increases the chance of immune rejection, especially by T cells, before exerting the desired regenerative functions. TNF? is one of the main mediators of EPC activation that recognizes two distinct receptors, TNFR1 and TNFR2. We have recently reported that human EPCs are immunosuppressive and this effect was TNF?-TNFR2 dependent. Here, we aimed to investigate if an adequate TNF? pre-conditioning could increase TNFR2 expression and prime EPCs towards more immunoregulatory functions.MethodsEPCs were pre-treated with several doses of TNF? to find the proper dose to up-regulate TNFR2 while keeping the TNFR1 expression stable. Then, co-cultures of human EPCs and human T cells were performed to assess whether TNF? priming would increase EPC immunosuppressive and immunomodulatory effect.ResultsTreating EPCs with 1 ng/ml TNF? significantly up-regulated TNFR2 expression without unrestrained increase of TNFR1 and other endothelial injury markers. Moreover, TNF? priming through its interaction with TNFR2 remarkably enhanced EPC immunosuppressive and anti-inflammatory effects. Conversely, blocking TNFR2 using anti-TNFR2 mAb followed by 1 ng/ml of TNF? treatment led to the TNF?-TNFR1 interaction and polarized EPCs towards pro-inflammatory and immunogenic functions.ConclusionsWe report for the first time the crucial impact of inflammation notably the TNF?-TNFR signaling pathway on EPC immunological function. Our work unveils the pro-inflammatory role of the TNF?-TNFR1 axis and, inversely the anti-inflammatory implication of the TNF?-TNFR2 axis in EPC immunoregulatory functions. Priming EPCs with 1 ng/ml of TNF? prior to their administration could boost them toward a more immunosuppressive phenotype. This could potentially lead to EPCs' longer presence in vivo after their allogenic administration resulting in their better contribution to angiogenesis and vascular regeneration. Video Abstract.

Project description:Previous research has demonstrated that people with Parkinson's disease (PD) have difficulties with the perceptual discrimination of rhythms, relative to healthy controls. It is not however clear if this applies only to simpler rhythms (a so called "beat-based" deficit), or if it is a more generalized deficit that also applies to more complex rhythms. Further insight into how people with PD process and perceive rhythm can refine our understanding of the well known problems of temporal processing in the disease. In this study, we wanted to move beyond simple/complex-dichotomy in previous studies, and further investigate the effect of tempo on the perception of musical rhythms. To this end, we constructed ten musical rhythms with a varied degree of complexity across three different tempi. Nineteen people with PD and 19 healthy controls part-took in an internet based listening survey and rated 10 different musical rhythms for complexity and likeability. In what we believe is the first study to do so, we asked for the participants subjective ratings of individual rhythms and not their capacity to directly compare or discriminate between them. We found an overall between-group difference in complexity judgments that was modulated by tempo, but not level of complexity. People with PD rated all rhythms as more complex across tempi, with significant group differences in complexity ratings at 120 and 150bpm, but not at 90bpm. Our analysis found a uniform elevated baseline for complexity judgments in the PD-group, and a strong association between the two groups' rank-ordering the rhythms for complexity. This indicates a preserved ability to discriminate between relative levels of complexity. Finally, the two groups did not significantly differ in their subjective scoring of likeability, demonstrating a dissimilarity between judgment of complexity and judgment of likeability between the two groups. This indicates different cognitive operations for the two types of judgment, and we speculate that Parkinson's disease affects judgment of complexity but not judgment of likeability.

Dataset Information

New evidence of a rhythmic priming effect that enhances grammaticality judgments in children.

Publications

New evidence of a rhythmic priming effect that enhances grammaticality judgments in children.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets