Music and Reading
How Can Music Training Help Students Read?
Dr. Christine Jurasinski LabLearner Staff Scientist
First grade students in LabLearner schools across the country have or are about to embark on a discovery and study of their five senses. In the Our Senses CELL students learn about the senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. As they explore each of these senses, they learn that each sense not only uses a sense organ such as the eyes, but also uses the brain to interpret and process information. But, exactly what type of cognitive processing occurs in our five senses? Recently, researchers have completed studies that shed some light on our sense of hearing and the interesting relationship between hearing, reading and music.
Through their experiments, scientists at Northwestern University have found that musicians are better at identifying spoken words when mixed with background noise than people who do not have musical training. Not surprising? For many people, this finding may seem intuitive. Through their training musicians learn to recognize pitch, timing and other spectral elements of sound. Thus, it would seem logical that these people may possess greater precision within their auditory and nervous systems for interpreting sound.
However, this new study presents information that the processes that occur when transcribing and encoding sound are enhanced in musicians as compared to “non-musicians” and that these same processes are deficient in children with dyslexia. Thus, there appears to be a relationship between sound encoding in the brain and linguistic abilities suggesting that poor or struggling readers may benefit from musical training.
Just how would musical training produce changes? One theory is that there are certain consonants that are often misinterpreted by the brain especially when heard in a noisy environment. Misinterpretation of consonants can make a difference in how words are read. Musical training may help by enhancing the ability of the brain to hear certain acoustic features of speech such as these consonants. A second theory is that musical training is linked to better working memory and improved auditory memory. Still another is that musical training includes a focus on timing which is related to temporal processing or the time to process auditory stimuli. Various aspects of temporal processing are affected in dyslexia and other auditory disorders. By emphasizing timing, musical training may help to alter or enhance temporal processing.
Research in this area will continue to provide answers that can help not only struggling readers, but the population in general. Maybe a song a day will be just what the doctor orders.
