The relation between beat perception and auditory ordinal encoding may not depend on neural entrainment

Various theories attempt to explain the association between musical rhythm perception and reading skills, with the Temporal Sampling Framework (TSF) being one. TSF posits that neural entrainment to auditory input facilitates both rhythm and speech perception, bolstering the acquisition of speech units at different frequencies. Indeed, we found a correlation between beat perception and ordinal encoding of meaningless auditory sequences in a previous study, albeit lacking direct evidence of neural entrainment’s role. In this study, participants engaged in a beat perception, auditory and visual ordinal encoding tasks while EEG was collected for neural entrainment analysis. We replicated the positive correlation between beat perception and auditory encoding and found neural entrainment to the frequency of auditory sequences. However, no direct evidence pointed to neural entrainment as the common mechanism. Our findings suggest that neural entrainment either operates differently than TSF predicted or is not the sole determinant of ordinal encoding.