The Relationship of Musical Pattern Discrimination Skill and Phonemic Awareness in Beginning Readers

In this study, the relationship of phoneme segmentation in language to pattern perception in music was investigated. The results showed that phoneme segmentation fluency scores were significantly correlated with tonal PMMA scores, r = 0.39, p In 1966, Isabelle Liberman began her pioneering work showing that the ability to segment words into their component sounds predicted the ability to read; therefore, by her thinking, children needed to be trained to hear the sounds that distinguish words rather than to memorize words by sight, as was generally believed to be the best approach to teaching reading at the time (Shankweiler, 1991). Since that original study, phonemic awareness, which can be defined as the awareness of individual phonemes in words, that is, that words are composed of sounds (Hempenstall, 2003), has repeatedly been shown to be critically important to beginning reading success (Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Valeska Schuster, & Yaghoub-Zadeh, 2001; Gromko, 2005; Nation & Hulme, 1997). In 1991, Ball and Blachman showed that phonemic awareness training like that implied by Liberman's theory had a positive influence on children's reading and spelling skills. In 1999, researchers confirmed that unique deficits in phonemic awareness play a role in most cases of reading disability (Olsen, Forsberg, Gayan, & DeFries, 1999). A meta-analysis conducted by the National Reading Panel (2001) revealed that phonemic awareness was one of the best predictors of how well children will learn to read, and a better predictor of individual differences in reading ability than onsetrime awareness (i.e., awareness of sounds that can be rhymed) (Ehri et al., 2001). According to Labov (2003), young readers with a first language other than English have trouble reading English because they do not have the phonetic sounds to draw from. For less skilled readers, phonemic awareness is the only unique predictor of reading success (Hulme, Hatcher, Nation, Brown, Adams, & Stuart, 2002). Ball and Blachman (1991) concluded that the most pedagogically sound method of phonemic awareness training is one that moves from sound to symbol and makes explicit the complete letter-to-sound mappings in words. Phonemic awareness both leads to acquisition of reading and spelling skills and is reinforced by reading and spelling skills (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994). Thus, people who have trouble learning to read have deficits in their phonemic awareness, not deficits in their visual system (Shaywitz, 1996). In 1997, Liberman added to this claim, arguing that the processes of writing, reading, speaking, and listening are linked skills. Phonemic segmentation ability, a sub-category of phonemic awareness, is thought to be a strong predictor of reading and spelling skill, even in the early stages of literacy development. Therefore, interventions that aim to prevent reading and spelling failure concentrate on phonemic awareness training by relating phonemes (/b/ in bat) to letters ("b") and by relating phonemes to the spelling patterns of words (Nation & Hulme, 1997). In 1998, Fletcher and Lyon showed that code-based instruction, which emphasizes identification of words based on letter-to-sound associations, leads to stronger reading skills than meaning-based instruction. Explicit instruction in the alphabetic principle (the principle that each letter represents a sound) leads to strong reading skills and remediation catches children up to their normal reading peers. …