More on music (Ga) and reading (Grw)

A few minutes after my earlier post today regarding musical abilities and language development my trusty Glr kicked in. I recalled writing about recent research that has demonstrated a link between musical abilities (Ga-U1, U9, U5) and reading development in young children. Below is the paragraph I wrote which is part of a CHC: Past, Present and Future on-line chapter.

• In a welcome contribution to the internal (structural) and external Ga validity literature, Anvari, Trainor, Woodside and Levy (2002) explored the relations between phonological awareness (PC), music perception, and early reading in a sample of 100 four- and five-year old children. Consistent with the above reviewed literature, factor analyses of the four Anvari et al. (2002) PC measures (rhyme generation, oddity, blending, and the Rosner task) revealed a single factor at both age levels. Exploratory analysis of the music tasks (same/different melody, same/different chord, chord analysis, same/different rhythm, and rhythm production tasks) revealed a single music factor for four-year olds and two factors (pitch perception; rhythm perception) for five-year olds. The musical factors appear to measures aspects of the Musical Discrimination and Judgment (U1, U9) and Sound- Frequency Discrimination (U5) reported by Carroll (1993). Moderate factor correlations (.33 to .59) supported the independence of the music perception and PC ability factors. Further support for separate music perception and PC abilities was the intriguing finding that “music perception skill predicts reading even after the variance shared with phonemic awareness is removed. This suggests that phonemic awareness and music perception ability tap some of the same basic auditory and/or cognitive skills needed for reading but that they each also tap unique processing skills” (Anvari et al., 2002, p.127).

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music.