Sounding it Out
/Summary of research: Reading
Kathleen M. Howland, Ph.D.
Music study group for Northborough-Southborough school district
The current incidence of dyslexia is 1:5. Parents of children who have a family history of dyslexia, may want to enroll their children in early childhood music education classes starting in infancy. Research from Children’s Hospital in Boston shows that 3 year olds who can’t distinguish patterns of sound as being the same or different, have a higher probability of becoming dyslexic. This cutting edge, progressive research again shows us the import of music, especially in the 0-7 year age range (see the review for music in infancy) to train the brain for listening.
Reading is sound based. Children need to learn to decode a written letter to a speech sound. An example of the complexity of sound associations to written letters can be seen with the letter ‘c.’ It can make a /k/ sound as well as an /s/ sound. The word ‘concert’ has both the /k/ and the /s/ sound. When there are two c’s together, they make a ‘ch’ sound as in cacciatore. Combined with an ‘h’ sound, ‘ch’ can be heard differently in the words cache and check. There is tremendous complexity in reading, especially in the English language. For a young child who has a poor relationship to sound, making sound associations is that much harder.
Here is an abstract from a significant study in this area.
There is some evidence for a role of music training in boosting phonological awareness, word segmentation, working memory, as well as reading abilities in children with typical development. Poor performance in tasks requiring temporal processing, rhythm perception and sensorimotor synchronization seems to be a crucial factor underlying dyslexia in children. Interestingly, children with dyslexia show deficits in temporal processing, both in language and in music. Within this framework, we test the hypothesis that music training, by improving temporal processing and rhythm abilities, improves phonological awareness and reading skills in children with dyslexia. The study is a prospective, multicenter, open randomized controlled trial, consisting of test, rehabilitation and re-test (ID NCT02316873). After rehabilitation, the music group (N = 24) performed better than the control group (N = 22) in tasks assessing rhythmic abilities, phonological awareness and reading skills. This is the first randomized control trial testing the effect of music training in enhancing phonological and reading abilities in children with dyslexia. The findings show that music training can modify reading and phonological abilities even when these skills are severely impaired. Through the enhancement of temporal processing and rhythmic skills, music might become an important tool in both remediation and early intervention programs.
In summary, music perception is essential to language perception which is crucial for reading skills. In addition to a novel sound based approach to remediating reading abilities, it looks as though it would be possible to reduce the incidence of dyslexia through early identification and treatment.
Bibliography
Flaugnacco E, Lopez L, Terribili C, Montico M, Zoia S, Schön D (2015) Music Training Increases Phonological Awareness and Reading Skills in Developmental Dyslexia: A Randomized Control Trial. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0138715. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0138715
Habib, M., Lardy, C., Desiles, T., COmmeriras, C., Chobert, J. & Besson, M. (2016). Music and Dyslexia: A New Musical Training Method to Improve Reading and Related Disorders. Frontiers in Psychology, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00026
Tierney, A. & Kraus, N. (2013). Music training for the development of reading skills. Progress in Brain Research, 207, 209-241
Zuk, J., Perdue, MV, Becker, B., Yu, X., Chang, M., Raschle, NM, Gaab, N. (2018). Neural correlates of phonological processing: Disrupted in children with dyslexia and enhanced in musically trained children.Neuroscience, 34, 82-91