Musical perception skills, phonological awareness, and reading difficulties in Chinese

Abstract

Alphabetic studies have indicated that musical activities can be used as a means of bolstering language and pre-reading skills for children. Nevertheless, the associations between musical performance, phonological awareness, and non-alphabetic readingrelated abilities were still unclear, especially in Chinese literatures. This study, therefore, was aimed to explore (1) whether children with Chinese reading difficulties (RD) would show impairments in the musical, phonological, and reading-related variables, compared to normal readers., and (2) whether there are any particular association among musical skills, phonological awareness, and reading abilities for Chinese children with RD. A series of psychometric, phonological, and reading-related tasks were administrated to a sample of 59 native speakers of Mandarin, including 32 chronological aged-matched typical readers (CA controls) and 27 children with reading difficulties (RD group). Generally, results showed that RD group was significantly poorer than CA controls in most of phonological and reading-related tasks. Children with RD appeared to have weaker performance in some particular musical tasks, including rhythm discrimination and chord discrimination. Moreover, hierarchical regression analyses further demonstrated that children’s performance of rhythm discrimination can have significant prediction particularly in their onset and rime awareness. Our results suggested the implications of further exploring the idea of musical intervention as well as the research design on Chinese children.