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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Dev. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Development
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdpys.2025.1528427
A longitudinal study of tapping to the beat by school-aged children with and without dyslexia: Assessments of the mediating role of phonology.
Provisionally accepted
Sheila Flanagan *
Angela M Wilson Fiona C Gabrielczyk Annabel Macfarlane Georgia Feltham 
Kanad Mandke 
Usha Goswami - University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Here we report a longitudinal study of the relations between tapping consistency, phonological awareness and literacy development in a sample of children initially aged around 8 years who were followed for a period of 6 years. The sample tested here comprised 121 participants, some of whom were diagnosed with developmental dyslexia (DYS, N=58). The other typically-developing children were either chronological age-matched controls (CA, N=30) for DYS, or reading-age matched controls (RA, N=33). The task was tapping to a 2 Hz beat, and the data were analysed using circular statistics. This resulted in a vector for each child with two dependent variables, magnitude (length, between 0 and 1, often termed synchronization consistency) and phase (+/- π radians). The number of children able to synchronize (“Synchronizers”) increased with age, and so did synchronization consistency. The number of “Non-synchronizers”, children tapping at random, declined as the study progressed. Time-lagged relations between synchronization consistency and composite measures of phonological awareness and literacy were significant during the first three years of the study. They remained significant for the literacy composite as the children got older. All groups of children (DYS, CA, RA) established a significant preferred tapping phase, however time-lagged relations between the behavioural composites and phase measures were not significant at any time point. Mediation analysis and multiple regression analyses showed that tapping consistency significantly predicted later phonological awareness, and that cross-sectional relations between rhythmic synchronization and literacy were mediated by phonology. The data are discussed in terms of Temporal Sampling theory.
Keywords: Rhythm, phonology, literacy, developmental dyslexia, Children
Received: 14 Nov 2024; Accepted: 19 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Flanagan, Wilson, Gabrielczyk, Macfarlane, Feltham, Mandke and Goswami. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Sheila Flanagan, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
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