As the biological basis of human musical traits, including rhythm skills, and their links to health emerged in recent years, a leading voice in these discoveries has been Reyna Gordon, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt Music Cognition Lab.
Now, she and her team of researchers have discovered common genetic roots in rhythmic impairment and certain language-related traits. In fact, they found multiple instances of genetic overlap between rhythm abilities and language abilities.
“These results were significant because they were the first molecular genetic evidence, mirroring what had been shown phenotypically in prior work by our group and others,” said Gordon, an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Rhythm Impairment as a Risk Factor
Rhythmic ability varies widely, even among non-musicians. Strong rhythmic synchronization is correlated with social bonding, positive well-being as well as stronger cognition and language skills. Conversely, rhythmic impairment tends to correlate with neurological disorders related to language, as well as certain diseases, including Parkinson’s.
“These results were significant because they were the first molecular genetic evidence, mirroring what had been shown phenotypically in prior work by our group and others.”
Family-based studies often enrolling identical twins show that motor performance, rhythmic abilities and the desire to practice music are all heritable to a significant degree, supporting genetic influences for musical proclivities.
Biological Links Suspected
Gordon’s research started several years ago when she and her colleagues set out to uncover biological relationships linking our genomes with rhythm, language and development.
In 2014, she published a paper establishing a phenotypic association between music and language skills linking a child’s ability to distinguish musical rhythmic sequences with their capacity for spoken grammar. That study included a finding of significant correlations between rhythm skills and key milestones in language development, including children’s ability to employ complex sentence structures, which is important for social communication and academic success.
“When we developed the Atypical Rhythm Risk Hypothesis in 2020, we proposed genetic overlap as a possible explanation of documented impaired rhythm skills in populations with speech, language, and reading disorders,” Gordon said.
Evolution of Rhythm and Language
In the current study, funded by the Office of the Director of NIH and the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the researchers probed the precise nature of this shared genetic composition.
Gordon and her colleagues, including members of the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute, identified 16 genomic loci shared between rhythm and language skills.
In collaboration with Simon Fisher’s lab at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, they then investigated a series of potential evolutionary signatures of the rhythm-language overlap signal. The signal was not enriched for human-gained enhancers, which are bits of genome that play a role in regulating gene expression during fetal brain development.
The outcomes of additional evolutionary analyses, led by first author, doctoral candidate Gokberk Alagoz, also revealed that a genetic variant located on the gene DLAT showed a distinct pattern: its variant was conserved in primates but rapidly shifted in early humans. This particular gene also has known links to neurodevelopmental disorders in human.
Together, these results open future clinical-translational investigations into rhythm and language processing as an important component of neurodevelopment, originating in shared genetic variation.
Neurodevelopment Links
After looking at the summary data confirming genetic links rhythm to language traits, Gordon and her team explored how the implicated genes play a role in brain structure and function.
The current study fits into a larger framework she developed with a collaborator, assistant professor Srishti Nayak, Ph.D.
According to their Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) framework, shared genetic predispositions between aspects of language development and musicality play a role in individual variation in brain development.
“Our genes are only part of the story… rhythm impairment may be one risk factor among many for developmental disorders in the domain of communication.”
From this work came additional insights about how language abilities link genetically to rhythm, finding that rhythm impairments were genetically linked to weaker scores on reading-related tasks like combining and sequencing speech sounds, a foundational component of literacy. In turn, genetic variants that confer a predisposition to more precise synchronization with a musical beat were protective against dyslexia.
Gordon cautions against inferring broad biological determinism from these findings.
“The results here show genetic overlap, but our genes are only part of the story, and each individual has their own unique genome and brain. Environment plays a role, too. Rhythm impairment may be one risk factor among many for developmental disorders in the domain of communication,” she said.
Musicality and Health
Now that the team has identified the overlap they had hypothesized in prior work, they are thinking ahead towards clinical applications. Gordon says future studies could harness the new knowledge to enhance our ability to identify childhood speech and language disorders.
They are also opening the doors to research on other aspects of musicality and health and communication, examining genetic influences on other musical traits, like musical practice throughout the lifespan. By conducting new genome-wide studies of musicality and systematically examining potential links to mental and physical health, they hope to understand more fully how musical tendencies contribute to the health and wellness of individuals.
