Fluent reading is a critical skill and is based on children's acquisition of several essential subskills, including phonological awareness. Musical activity has been used experimentally as a means of bolstering reading skills, including those of children with dyslexia, with preliminary indications that reading and music are related. Yet little is known about the exact relationships, and current music curricula are largely unguided by empirically-based understanding of the specific links between these two domains.
This study included basic research into musical rhythm and phonological awareness subskills in kindergartners, and found that phonological segmentation subskills at the word, syllable, and phoneme level, and rhyming ability were significantly related to rhythm pattern production and/or perception abilities. The relationship to tempo pattern production was inconclusive: a positive relationship between phonological segmentation and tempo production was found at the word level but was contradicted by inverse results at the syllable level and in rhyming production.
In a longitudinal design, the study compared phonological awareness subskills of kindergartners in two schools: one with daily music lessons and the other with weekly lessons. The phonological awareness subskills of the groups were equal at the beginning of the year, but, at the end of the year, the children who received intensive musical training showed disproportionate improvement in rhyming skills and greater ability to perform phoneme segmentation tasks, in comparison to those who had received less musical training. The children in the musical training intensive group also showed disproportionate improvement in their rhythm pattern production subskills. Rhythm and Phonological Awareness.
The study's results suggest that musical training is related to improvements in children's phonological awareness subskills in rhyming and phoneme segmentation. Research has shown that phonological awareness enhances reading acquisition. Therefore, the pathway by which musical training in young children could affect reading acquisition may lie through enhancement of phonological awareness. Further research is needed to separate the contribution of musical rhythm activities from special exposure to language through singing songs with rhyming lyrics. Both of these aspects of musical training could improve the children's performance in phonological processing tasks.
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