Rhythmic abilities have been related to language processing skills such as phonological awareness, rise time discriminationand verbal memory. Following this reasoning, they have also been linked to reading acquisition. In particular, in prereaders,tapping to a beat, a task that entails rhythmic processing through auditory-motor synchronization (AMS), has shown todiscriminate children with poor and good phonological skills. However, evidence regarding how the AMS-reading linkdevelops through time, starting before reading instruction, is scarce. In the present study, we followed a large sample of600 children from kindergarten to second grade, through a digital assessment of literacy and literacy-related skills, as wellas rhythmic abilities. We found that AMS in K5 uniquely contributes to future reading performance, above and beyondphonological skills. These findings underscore the role of rhythmic abilities in reading acquisition, and its relation tophonological processing.

We propose and test a theoretical perspective in which a universal hallmark of successful literacy acquisition is the convergence of the speech and orthographic processing systems onto a common network of neural structures, regardless of how spoken words are represented orthographically in a writing system. During functional MRI, skilled adult readers of four distinct and highly contrasting languages, Spanish, English, Hebrew, and Chinese, performed an identical semantic categorization task to spoken and written words. Results from three complementary analytic approaches demonstrate limited language variation, with speech-print convergence emerging as a common brain signature of reading proficiency across the wide spectrum of selected languages, whether their writing system is alphabetic or logographic, whether it is opaque or transparent, and regardless of the phonological and morphological structure it represents.