Scholars debate whether musical and linguistic abilities are associated or independent. In the present study, we examined whether musical rhythm skills predict receptive grammar proficiency in childhood. In Experiment 1, 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 68) were tested on their grammar and rhythm abilities. In the grammar-comprehension task,…

Examined whether newborns were able to discriminate different stress patterns in multisyllabic stressed Italian words that varied both in consonants and in number of syllables. Found that newborns were sensitive to words' rhythm, as carried by stress patterns, and that this prosodic information was salient even in the presence of substantial…