Edited by: Lutz Jäncke, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Reviewed by: Urs Maurer, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Glenn Schellenberg, University of Toronto, Canada
*Correspondence: Franziska Degé, Developmental Psychology, Department of Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10F, 35394 Giessen, Germany. e-mail:
This article was submitted to Frontiers in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.
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The present experiment investigated the effect of a music program on phonological awareness in preschoolers. In particular, the effects of a music program and a phonological skills program on phonological awareness were compared. If language and music share basic processing mechanisms, the effect of both programs on enhancing phonological awareness should be similar. Forty-one preschoolers (22 boys) were randomly assigned to a phonological skills program, a music program, and a control group that received sports training (from which no effect was expected). Preschoolers were trained for 10 min on a daily basis over a period of 20 weeks. In a pretest, no differences were found between the three groups in regard to age, gender, intelligence, socioeconomic status, and phonological awareness. Children in the phonological skills group and the music group showed significant increases in phonological awareness from pre- to post-test. The children in the sports group did not show a significant increase from pre- to post-test. The enhancement of phonological awareness was basically driven by positive effects of the music program and the phonological skills program on phonological awareness for large phonological units. The data suggests that phonological awareness can be trained with a phonological skills program as well as a music program. These results can be interpreted as evidence of a shared sound category learning mechanism for language and music at preschool age.
Language and music are specific to humans and share several characteristics such as the use of the auditory domain as the input path and the organization of discrete perceptual elements into structured sequences (Patel,
Empirical evidence has supported McMullen and Saffran's (
Although musical and linguistic sound systems have different organizations of pitch and timbre, both sound systems face the challenge of extracting a small number of categories that are meaningful from a flow of acoustically variable signals. Moreover, the mind must separate variation within a category, e.g., induced by variable speakers, from variation that constitutes a change of category. These challenges are likely solved by a shared mechanism (Patel,
This hypothesis is supported by Lamb and Gregory (
The aim of the present experiment was twofold. Firstly, the effect of a music program on phonological awareness was investigated. Previous studies demonstrated a relation between musical abilities as well as music training and phonological awareness. However, because of the correlational and quasi-experimental approaches of these studies, it was not possible to establish the specific causation. Secondly, the current investigation compared the effect of a music program and phonological skills program on phonological awareness to examine the adaptability of the “shared sound category learning mechanism hypothesis.” If this hypothesis is correct, the effect of the music program and the phonological skills program on phonological awareness should be comparable. To our knowledge, no study has addressed this question with such an approach. To this end, an experiment was conducted that randomly assigned preschoolers to a music program, a phonological skills program, and a control group that received sports training (from which no effect was expected). All preschoolers were trained for 10 min on a daily basis for a period of 20 weeks. Phonological awareness was tested prior to the beginning of training (pretest) and after the completion of training (post-test). This approach allowed inferences of causation and, due to random assignment, ruled out systematic differences between the groups. Moreover, the control group, which received sports training, offered the possibility to control for the effects of retesting, maturation, and attention (i.e., Hawthorne effect). Furthermore, this approach allowed the comparison between the effect of a music program and a program that explicitly addressed phonological awareness.
At the beginning of the experiment, the sample consisted of 55 participants. Some children transferred to a different kindergarten during the phase of trainings, and others were not available for the post-test. Five participants were excluded from the analysis because their pretest phonological skills scores were more than 2 SD from the mean. Hence, differences in phonological skills prior to training were minimized. Overall, 75% (
Children were trained for 10 min on a daily basis for a period of 20 weeks. Thus, participants received a total of 100 sessions. Preschoolers were trained in groups of five to seven children. The programs were implemented by trained research assistants. Each assistant implemented every program (phonological skills, music, sports). The preschoolers were trained at the kindergarten in a quiet room that offered sufficient space for the different tasks. A typical session comprised a short welcome (small talk, attendance check) and two different tasks that were approximately 5 minutes in duration.
The music program was created by the authors. It was based on a well-established program for early music education (Nykrin et al.,
The phonological skills program was a well-established program that was specifically designed to train phonological awareness (Küspert and Schneider,
The sports training was created by the authors and contained exercises to train balance, physical strength, endurance, coordination, fine-motor abilities, body perception, and relaxation. Typical sports sessions contained relaxation exercises and well-directed throwing. For relaxation training, children imagined that they were an air mattress losing all air, and the throwing exercises included throwing balls into boxes and buckets of different sizes. Another typical session involved playing football in atypical body positions such as walking on their hands and feet with their belly up (crayfish football) and mastering a path with closed eyes while relying on the instruction of a teammate. Tug-of-war games and balancing objects on different body parts were also typical.
Control variables such as age, gender, intelligence, and socioeconomic status as well as phonological awareness were assessed.
Using a questionnaire designed by the authors, details about parents’ education was assessed as a measure of socioeconomic status. For statistical purposes, mothers’ and fathers’ education were coded as a dichotomous variable, with 0 for “no university education” and 1 for “university education,” and a composite variable (i.e., the average of the two scores) was used in the analyses.
To measure intelligence, the culture fair test (CFT1; Weiß and Osterland,
Phonological awareness was assessed with the following four subtests of the Bielefelder Screening (BISC; Jansen et al.,
Prior to the pretest, the informed consent of the parents was attained and the demographic questionnaire was sent to the participants. A pretest that assessed intelligence and phonological awareness was conducted. The intelligence test was performed in groups of five to six children, whereas phonological awareness was assessed in individual sessions, and the assessments were performed on consecutive days. The pretest was followed by 20 weeks of training. Subsequent to training, the post-test was conducted. The post-test involved the individual assessment of phonological awareness. The same test that was utilized in the pretest was applied. At the end of the project, each child received a present and a certificate for participation.
Differences in gender, age, intelligence, and socioeconomic status between the music group, the phonological skills group, and the control group were controlled. The ratio of male to female was not significantly different between the three groups, χ2(2
Control variable | Music program |
Phonological skills program |
Control group |
---|---|---|---|
Age (in months) | 70.46 (3.9) | 69.14 (4.2) | 68.21 (4) |
Intelligence | 113.92 (12.5) | 111.64 (10.3) | 113.6 (11.9) |
Children in all three groups were comparable in socioeconomic status, χ2(4
Music program | Phonological skills program | Control group | |
---|---|---|---|
No. parent | 7 | 5 | 5 |
At least one parent | 4 | 7 | 9 |
At the pretest, the music group, phonological skills group, and control group did not significantly differ in phonological awareness,
Phonological awareness scores were entered into a 3 (group: music, phonological skills, control) × 2 (condition: pretest vs. post-test) ANOVA with repeated measures on the last factor. This analysis revealed a significant main effect of condition,
For the comparison between the phonological skills group and the control group, phonological awareness scores were entered into a 2 (group: phonological skills, control) × 2 (condition: pretest vs. post-test) ANOVA with repeated measures on the last factor. This analysis revealed a significant group × condition interaction,
The comparison of the two treatment groups revealed no significant group × condition interaction,
Subsequently, differences in phonological awareness were analyzed in greater detail. The groups’ phonological awareness on the phoneme level (small phonological units) and on the word level (larger phonological units) was compared.
For the small phonological units, a 3 (group: music, phonological skills, control) × 2 (condition: pretest vs. posttest) ANOVA with repeated measures on the last factor revealed a significant main effect of condition,
For large phonological units, a 3 (group: music, phonological skills, control) × 2 (condition: pretest vs. posttest) ANOVA with repeated measures on the last factor revealed a marginal significant main effect of condition,
The aim of the current experiment was to investigate the effect of a music program on phonological awareness in preschoolers. Additionally, this effect was compared to the effect of a phonological skills program, which was specifically developed to enhance phonological skills.
To this end, preschoolers were randomly assigned to a music program, a phonological skills program, and a control group that received sports training (from which no effect was expected). Participants were trained 10 min daily for 20 weeks. Prior to training, participants were administered a pretest on phonological awareness. Following training, the participants were retested on phonological awareness. At the pretest, no significant differences were found between the treatment groups and the control group with respect to possible confounding variables (gender, age, intelligence, and socioeconomic status). This supported the assumption that the groups did not systematically differ due to random assignment and ruled out the most likely alternative explanations of any observed trainings effect. Additionally, at the pretest, no differences in phonological awareness (overall score, small phonological units, large phonological units) were revealed. Thus, random assignment resulted in three groups that did not systematically differ on the tested variables prior to training.
A positive effect of the music program and the phonological skills program was found on phonological awareness. Preschoolers who participated in the music program or the phonological skills program significantly increased in phonological awareness, whereas such an increase was not found in the control group. Specifically, the treatment and control groups showed differential development in phonological awareness of large phonological units. Both treatment groups improved in phonological awareness of large phonological units, whereas such an improvement was not found in the control group. All three groups showed a similar development in phonological awareness of small phonological units. Thus, the experiment provides evidence of an enhancing effect of the music program on phonological awareness, in particular on phonological awareness of large phonological units.
This result is in accordance with the previous findings of Anvari et al. (
The size of the positive effect of the music program (
A limitation of the experiment is the sample size. The sample was quite small due to the time, effort, and cost–intensive nature of the experiment as well as the initial matching. Future research should attempt to establish causation with a larger sample size. Another important limitation was that no explicit measure of motivation was employed. It is possible that children enjoyed a particular program more than another or that parents influenced children's motivation to participate. Since all activities (phonological skills program, music program, sports training) were designed for preschoolers, it is highly likely that the children enjoyed all programs equally. Nevertheless, this was not explicitly assessed. With respect to parental influence, parents were not blind to the goal (train phonological awareness) but were blind to their child's particular trainings group. However, it is possible that the child reported about the activity in the session and the parents learned their child's group placement. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether parents practiced phonological awareness at home with the children or attempted to increase children's motivation to participate. Moreover, it is equally likely that parents of the sports training group practiced phonological awareness to prevent deficits or parents of the treatment groups to promote the child's abilities. These issues should be addressed in future research.
Considering the importance of phonological awareness in the emergence of literacy, the results point toward music programs as valuable preparation for learning to read and write. Hence, a music program could either be used as an alternative approach to train phonological awareness or used to complement existing phonological awareness programs. For a successful combination of music programs and existing phonological awareness programs, it may be important to identify the specific musical components of the music program that contributed to the advancement of phonological awareness. Then, the most important components of both training approaches could be combined.
The current results indicate that a music program can enhance phonological awareness, in particular phonological awareness of large phonological units (e.g., rhyming, segmenting, and blending). This enhancement is comparable to the effects of a phonological skills program on phonological awareness. Therefore, it seems highly likely that language and music share processing mechanisms, explicitly sound category learning mechanisms.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
This research was supported by a grant for educational research (TP9 6050085) from the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen and the graduate school “NeuroAct” (neuronal representation and action control) of the University of Gießen and the University of Marburg. The authors would like to thank the participating kindergartens as well as all of the participants and their parents.