'Rhythm production at school entry as a predictor of poor reading and spelling at the end of first grade'
by Kjersti Lundetræ1 and Jenny M. Thomson.
"Children’s ability to read, especially in the primary years of education, remains a principle measure of an education system’s success......Developmentally, speech rhythm is one of the first cues used by infants to segment the speech stream into words and word parts and caregivers naturally exaggerate the rhythm of their speech when interacting with their infants. Spoken syllables provide language with a regular beat—within words syllables carry core information regarding a word’s sound, or phonological structure, as well as its morphology, whilst the combination of syllables and words into another aspect of speech rhythm—intonation—contributes to meaning..."