Anticipating the beat: rhythm and meter in developmental dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia has been associated with impaired auditory temporal processing, which is thought to underlie phonological and, in turn, reading difficulties through reduced sensitivity to the temporal regularities of speech. Notably, these temporal impairments extend beyond language, with evidence indicating disruptions in nonverbal domains such as sensorimotor synchronization. The present study investigates the role of timing in reading skills by comparing rhythmic awareness, meter synchronization, and anticipatory planning in children with and without dyslexia, in order to determine whether difficulties in rhythm and meter contribute to impairments in anticipatory planning that may underlie phonological and reading deficits. A group of 40 third graders (22 females), including 20 with typical development and 20 with a diagnosis of dyslexia, took part in two testing sessions assessing reading skills, phonological awareness, working memory, rhythmic discrimination, tapping, and anticipation tasks. Overall, the results indicate that, while children with dyslexia show intact rhythmic discrimination, they exhibit tempo-dependent differences in sensorimotor synchronization, with the largest impairments emerging at the slowest beat rates. These difficulties were accompanied by lower phase consistency and reduced sensitivity of internal timekeeping, whereas anticipatory planning did not differ between groups. By considering these findings, we put forward the Narrowed Timekeeping Window Hypothesis (NTWH). We propose that children with dyslexia operate within a narrower optimal timekeeping window than typically developing peers, showing relatively preserved synchronization at intermediate tempi but reduced stability in maintaining internally generated temporal representations as the temporal interval moves outside this optimal window.