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
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