Do music skills help children learn to read and spell?
A child's ability to reproduce rhythms and perceive pitch is closely linked to their awareness of language sounds and their spelling skills, but music skills do not directly predict reading comprehension once language-sound awareness is accounted for.
Source
Are Temporal and Tonal Musical Skills Related to Phonological Awareness and Literacy Skills? - Evidence From Two Cross-Sectional Studies With Children From Different Age Groups
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Rhythm reproduction and pitch perception predicting phonological awareness and spelling in preschoolers and third-graders
- N
- Kindergarten sample n = 54; third-grade sample n = 96 (ages 7;10–10;5)
- Population
- German preschoolers in their last kindergarten year and third-graders in Erfurt
- Outcome
- Phonological awareness (and third-grade spelling) predicted by rhythm reproduction and pitch perception
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Inspect source passages
Do music skills help children learn to read and spell?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
54 children
Thus, the sample of the current study consisted of 54 children (30 male, 24 female) on which all further analyses were based.
96 children
Thus, the final sample of the current study, on which all further analyses were based, consisted of 96 children (42 male, 54 female) in the age range from 7;10 to 10;5 (mean age: 8;9).
What they did
Researchers conducted cross-sectional studies in Germany, testing a group of 54 preschool children and another group of 96 third-graders. All children completed several tablet-based musical tasks assessing pitch, contour, tempo, rhythm perception, and rhythm reproduction. The researchers then evaluated the preschoolers' phonological awareness (for both large sound units and phonemes) and the third-graders' phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, and spelling strategies.
What they found
In both age groups, rhythm reproduction and pitch perception significantly predicted language-sound awareness. Together, these two music skills explained 26.2% of the variance in preschoolers' phonological awareness and 18.1% of the variance in third-graders' phonemic awareness. For third-graders, rhythm reproduction also predicted spelling accuracy, explaining 13.3% of the variance in the number of correctly spelled graphemes, and combined with pitch perception to explain 22.7% of the variance in alphabetic spelling strategies.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because both studies used a cross-sectional design, they cannot prove that musical training causes better language or literacy skills. The sample was restricted to children from a single region in Germany, meaning the findings might not generalize to other languages with different spelling-to-sound rules. Additionally, because the rhythm reproduction task required physical tapping and memory, the study cannot entirely rule out that general motor coordination or working memory drove the observed connections.
Key terms
- Phonological awareness
- The ability to recognize and manipulate oral language structures such as syllables, onsets, and rimes.
- Phonemic awareness
- A specific subcategory of phonological awareness focused on identifying and manipulating individual speech sounds (phonemes).
- Tonal skills
- Musical abilities related to processing spectral and frequency information, such as pitch, melody, and harmony.
- Temporal musical skills
- Musical abilities related to processing time-based structures, such as rhythm, tempo, and meter.
- Grapheme-phoneme mapping
- The relationship between printed letters (graphemes) and the individual sounds of spoken language (phonemes).
- Cross-sectional study
- A research design that analyzes data from a population at a single point in time to identify relationships between variables.
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How do phonological awareness skills typically develop in children regarding the size of the sound units?
Common questions
Does learning a musical instrument make children better at reading?
This study shows a correlation but does not prove causation. However, it suggests that practicing rhythm and pitch might support the auditory skills needed to process spoken language, which in turn helps with reading.
Why is rhythm reproduction more strongly linked to spelling than rhythm perception?
Rhythm reproduction requires both hearing a pattern and physically tapping it. This active integration of sensory perception and motor control mirrors spelling, which requires translating perceived speech sounds into physical writing.
Why did musical skills not uniquely predict reading comprehension?
Reading comprehension relies on complex cognitive, vocabulary, and syntactic processes. The relationship between basic musical skills and reading comprehension is likely indirect, mediated by lower-level skills like phonemic awareness.
Why were different language assessments used for the two age groups?
Preschoolers in Germany have not received formal reading instruction, making broader sound patterns like syllables and rhymes more relevant. Third-graders have learned to read, making individual speech sound awareness (phonemic awareness) the more appropriate metric.
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