The relation between beat perception and auditory ordinal encoding may not depend on neural entrainment

Various theories have attempted to explain the association between the perception of musical rhythm and reading skills, one οf them being the Temporal Sampling Framework (TSF). According to TSF, neural entrainment to auditory input facilitates both rhythm and speech perception, in the latter case by enhancing the acquisition of speech units (ordinal encoding) at different frequencies. In line with this, we found a correlation between beat perception and ordinal encoding of meaningless auditory sequences in a previous study, but evidence that neural entrainment underpins this association is still lacking. In the current investigation, participants engaged in a beat perception task alongside auditory and visual ordinal encoding tasks during which their EEG was recorded and later analyzed for strength of neural entrainment. We replicated the positive correlation between beat perception and auditory encoding, and we found neural entrainment to the frequency of auditory sequences (around 2.5 Hz). However, no direct evidence pointed to neural entrainment as the common mechanism. Our findings suggest that neural entrainment either operates differently than TSF predicted or is not the sole determinant of ordinal encoding.