In a heartbeat

Many children with dyslexia cannot keep up with the flow of text fluently enough to convert symbols into sound ..then sound into meaning. To read OK, the brain has about 40 milliseconds to do this. For children with reading difficulties, this may take as many as 500 milliseconds. According to Usha Goswami [link] part of the problem may be caused by difficulty in perceiving the rhythm of speech. Goswami and her colleagues discovered that dyslexic children could not track the beat in speech. The ability to detect a beat matters when the brain is trying to process syllables and phonemes. Like a metronome, it helps children pick-up the properties of speech in time. They inform me that the ability to keep the beat is so fundamental; the first language we learn is our own mother’s heartbeat.