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Abstract
Language and music are complex cognitive and neural functions that rely on awareness of one's own sound productions. Information on the awareness of vocal pitch, and its relation to phonemic awareness which is crucial for learning to read, will be important for understanding the relationship between tone-deafness and developmental language disorders such as dyslexia. Here we show that phonemic awareness skills are positively correlated with pitch perception–production skills in children. Children between the ages of seven and nine were tested on pitch perception and production, phonemic awareness, and IQ. Results showed a significant positive correlation between pitch perception–production and phonemic awareness, suggesting that the relationship between musical and linguistic sound processing is intimately linked to awareness at the level of pitch and phonemes. Since tone-deafness is a pitch-related impairment and dyslexia is a deficit of phonemic awareness, we suggest that dyslexia and tone-deafness may have a shared and/or common neural basis.
Highlights
Developmental dyslexia is a disorder in which children with normal intelligence and sensory abilities show learning deficits for reading (Démonet et al, 2004)
Having established multiple significant bivariate relationships between each set of variables, the step was to determine whether the relationship between Phonemic Awareness and Pitch Perception–Production existed even after controlling for general intelligence, age, SES, and musical training
This study demonstrates that phonemic awareness is correlated with pitch awareness, as assessed by the degree of agreement between pitch perception and pitch production
Summary
Developmental dyslexia is a disorder in which children with normal intelligence and sensory abilities show learning deficits for reading (Démonet et al, 2004). Studies have demonstrated significant relationships between phonemic awareness and musical sound processing in children as well as adults (Stadler, 1990; Anvari et al, 2002; Jentschke et al, 2005; Jones et al, 2009a; Moreno et al, 2009). Since consonants within a language are largely differentiated by temporally rapid sound elements, the ability to process temporally rapid changes is important for phonemic awareness. Support for this theory comes from the finding that auditory training that involves the gradual increase in temporal frequency of tones leads to improvements in auditory processing speed, speech discrimination, and language comprehension (Tallal, 2004; Tallal and Gaab, 2006)
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