Music Training Increases Phonological Awareness and Reading Skills in Developmental Dyslexia: A Randomized Control Trial

Abstract

There is some evidence for a role of music training in boosting phonological awareness, word segmentation, working memory, as well as reading abilities in children with typical development. Poor performance in tasks requiring temporal processing, rhythm perception and sensorimotor synchronization seems to be a crucial factor underlying dyslexia in children. Interestingly, children with dyslexia show deficits in temporal processing, both in language and in music. Within this framework, we test the hypothesis that music training, by improving temporal processing and rhythm abilities, improves phonological awareness and reading skills in children with dyslexia. The study is a prospective, multicenter, open randomized controlled trial, consisting of test, rehabilitation and re-test (ID NCT02316873). After rehabilitation, the music group (N = 24) performed better than the control group (N = 22) in tasks assessing rhythmic abilities, phonological awareness and reading skills. This is the first randomized control trial testing the effect of music training in enhancing phonological and reading abilities in children with dyslexia. The findings show that music training can modify reading and phonological abilities even when these skills are severely impaired. Through the enhancement of temporal processing and rhythmic skills, music might become an important tool in both remediation and early intervention programs.Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02316873

Fig 1. Flow chart illustrating participants’ recruitment and experimental design.

Fig 2. Effects of music and painting training on accuracy in the phonemic blending (a) and rhythm reproduction (b) tasks, before and after training.

Error bars indicate the standard error of the mean. Values are z-score normalized.

Fig 3. Scatter plot of the improvement in the rhythm reproduction task (accuracy After training—accuracy Before training) and the improvement in the Phonemic blending task (accuracy After training—accuracy Before training).

The ellipse contains the non-outlying data. The grey line represents the best linear fit to the remaining data (Spearman skipped correlation, [47]). The shadow represents the 95% bootstrap CI.