Music is an auditory art which may play an important role in the education and psychological development of children. Phonological awareness describes the ability to perceive, recognize, analyze and manipulate phonological units, which is an important indicator to predict children's literacy skills. It has been shown that children's musical competence could be associated with phonological skills. Musical training could be an important tool for early remediation and intervention on the development of children's phonological awareness, which needs further researches to confirm. The purpose of this study was to test the effect of musical training on the development of children's phonological awareness.
The first research applied a meta-analysis to eleven longitudinal controlled studies of children aged 3-to 12-year old(N=1264) to test whether the musical training leads to gains in children's phonological awareness skills. Hours of musical training and children's age were examined as potential moderators. The results showed that effect of musical training on children's phonological awareness was small but significantly. Effect on children's large phonological awareness tended to grow stronger with increased hours of training.
The second research applied detection tests to examine children's Chinese and English phonological awareness, and Gordon's musical aptitude tests to examine children's perception of rhythm and pitch, to explore the links between Chinese and English phonological awareness and musical competence in 4-and 5-year-old Chinese children. The result showed that the rhythm ability was strongly correlated with children's phonological awareness. Compared with the small phonological awareness, children's large phonological awareness was more strongly correlated with musical ability.
The third research was a longitudinal controlled experiment. 46 children aged 4 to 6 were assigned to the music group and the painting group for 6 months' training respectively. A battery of tests were conducted before, in the middle of and after the experiment to explore the effect of the music training on the development of children's Chinese and English phonological awareness. The result showed that totally 36 hours of musical training could significantly enhance children's Chinese phonological awareness, while it was not enough to enhance children's English phonological awareness.
The potential theoretical significance of the effects of musical training on children's phonological awareness was discussed in the context of revealing the cognitive neural mechanism and rules of human's language development, and the potential application in the field of children's education was also discussed.
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