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With respect to temporal auditory processing, the ability to process short or rapidly changing auditory information might be a prerequisite for intact phonological development and phoneme perception, as acoustic cues differentiating between phonemes may lie in time windows as short as 20–40 ms ( Bishop, 1997 Tallal, 2000).
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It is assumed that these basic auditory processing abilities might influence reading ability through their effects on children’s ability to extract phonological information from the speech stream ( Corriveau et al., 2010).
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In the last decades, empirical research has firmly established that phonological awareness is an important predictor of the development of reading and spelling (e.g., Bradley and Bryant, 1983 Näslund and Schneider, 1996 Caravolas et al., 2012 see Melby-Lervag et al., 2012, for review) and that deficits in phonological awareness are related to developmental dyslexia (e.g., Bruck, 1992 Ramus et al., 2003 White et al., 2006 see Melby-Lervag et al., 2012, for review).īesides phonological processing abilities, basic auditory processing abilities, such as temporal and spectral auditory processing, might be relevant for the development of phonological abilities as well as the development of reading and spelling. One component of phonological processing is phonological awareness, which is defined as one’s awareness of and access to the phonology of one’s language (see Wagner and Torgesen, 1987) and can refer to sound units of different sizes (e.g., syllable, onset and rime, phoneme). There is consensus in current research that phonological processing, or the use of phonological information in processing written and oral language ( Wagner and Torgesen, 1987), is of special importance for literacy development.
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The potential relevance of our results for applied research concerning early diagnosis and training of literacy-related skills is discussed. The finding that rhythm reproduction, an auditory temporal processing skill integrating perceptual and motor aspects of rhythm processing, was especially tightly linked to phonological awareness and literacy corroborates other findings on associations between rhythm processing and literacy development and is of interest from the viewpoint of current theories of developmental dyslexia. Hence, both studies indicate that temporal (i.e., rhythm reproduction) and spectral/tonal (i.e., pitch perception) musical skills are distinctly and uniquely related to phonological awareness in children from different age groups (preschool vs. Although various associations between music processing and literacy were found for third-graders in Study 2, after phonological awareness was accounted for, only rhythm reproduction made a unique contribution to literacy skills, namely, to alphabetic spelling skills. In both studies, rhythm reproduction and pitch perception turned out to be significant predictors of phonological awareness in stepwise regression analyses. In Study 2, third-graders (about 8 years of age) were investigated concerning relations between music processing, phonological awareness, reading comprehension, and spelling. To gain more insights into the specific, potentially age-dependent relevance of various temporal (e.g., rhythm, tempo) and tonal (e.g., pitch, melody) musical subdomains for phonological awareness and literacy, we adapted five music-processing tasks (three temporal, two tonal) for use with tablet computers and used them in two cross-sectional studies with German children from two age groups: Study 1 was conducted with preschool children (about 5 years of age without formal reading and spelling instruction) and focused on associations between music processing and phonological awareness. Additionally, associations between the processing of temporal or spectral/tonal information in music and phonological awareness/literacy have been reported, but findings concerning relations between music processing and spelling are rather sparse. Indeed, studies with unselected children have found links between these basic auditory processing abilities and the development of phonological awareness, reading, and spelling. Temporal and spectral auditory processing abilities are required for efficient and unimpaired processing of speech and might thus be associated with the development of phonological and literacy skills in children.