The Effect of Music Instruction on Phonemic Awareness in Beginning Readers

The purpose of this study was to determine whether music instruction was related to significant gains in the development of young children's phonemic awareness, particularly in their phoneme-segmentation fluency. Beginning in January 2004 and continuing through the end of April 2004, each of four intact classrooms of kindergarten children ( n= 43) from one elementary school were taught music by one of four advanced music-methods students from a nearby university. Kindergarten children ( n= 60) at a second elementary school served as the control group. An analysis of the data revealed that kindergarten children who received 4 months of music instruction showed significantly greater gains in development of their phoneme segmentation fluency when compared to children who did not receive music instruction, t=−3.52, df= 101, p= .001. The results support a near-transfer hypothesis that active music-making and the association of sound with developmentally appropriate symbols may develop cognitive processes similar to those needed for segmentation of a spoken word into its phonemes. December 14, 2004 August 1, 2005