"..the rhythm of spoken language is a crucial cue to understanding"

I believe there's a more precise and fundamental connection between these faculties, but key to it is the distinction between beats (as applied in the research), and rhythm, as alluded to in the quote above - a beat is a pulse, a single temporal frequency. Rhythm, OTOH, is an interplay between two or more such frequencies.

Specifically, rhythm is information about the relationship between temporal frequencies.. just as harmony is about the relationship between spatial frequencies.

The scaffold of all music and language is thus simplicity - the simplest possible frequency relationships are factors of two of a fundamental. All other harmonic intervals and rhythms are, by definition, more complex. And the complexity of any word or phrase is likewise measured against the relative simplicity of these informational 'ground states'.

Tests with actual rhythms, such as 2F, will yield even better results..