Abstract
Well-developed phonological awareness skills are a core prerequisite for early literacy development. Although effective phonological awareness training programs exist, children at risk often do not reach similar levels of phonological awareness after the intervention as children with normally developed skills. Based on theoretical considerations and first promising results the present study explores effects of an early musical training in combination with a conventional phonological training in children with weak phonological awareness skills. Using a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design and measurements across a period of 2 years, we tested the effects of two interventions: a consecutive combination of a musical and a phonological training and a phonological training alone. The design made it possible to disentangle effects of the musical training alone as well the effects of its combination with the phonological training. The outcome measures of these groups were compared with the control group with multivariate analyses, controlling for a number of background variables. The sample included N = 424 German-speaking children aged 4–5 years at the beginning of the study. We found a positive relationship between musical abilities and phonological awareness. Yet, whereas the well-established phonological training produced the expected effects, adding a musical training did not contribute significantly to phonological awareness development. Training effects were partly dependent on the initial level of phonological awareness. Possible reasons for the lack of training effects in the musical part of the combination condition as well as practical implications for early literacy education are discussed.
Highlights
Well-developed language competencies and literacy skills are basic requirements for academic success and social integration
Focusing on the children with weak phonological awareness, the analysis revealed a main effect of time, F(1, 98) = 97.140, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.49, indicating that both the training and the control group improved from t1 to t2
The interaction of time and training, turned out to be non-significant, F(1, 98) = 1.289, p > 0.05, the means showed that the training group started from an overall lower level at t1 and reached the same t2-level as the control group. The fact that this difference did not reach the level of significance is most likely due to the low statistical power caused by the small sample sizes of the respective weak groups
Summary
Well-developed language competencies and literacy skills are basic requirements for academic success and social integration. For children at risk an early training of these competencies is key for promoting individual academic development. Helping children to catch up with their peers in language-related competencies as early as possible prevents disparities in subsequent phases of Training Phonological Awareness academic development. Among the measures designed to promote language-related skills, the support of early literacy development by training phonological awareness is a prominent example. Examples are the ability to rhyme words, to segment words into syllables as well as to blend and delete phonemes. The ability to analyze and manipulate larger sound units, such as words and syllables, is labeled as phonological awareness in the broader sense (broad) whereas the ability to analyze and manipulate small sound units (phonemes) is referred to as phonological awareness in the narrower sense (narrow; Skowronek and Marx, 1989)
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