The relation between musical abilities and the phonological awareness in pre-school children

Abstract

The pre-school period plays a very important role in the language development. One of the significant indicators of this development is the phonological awareness. Some of the previous studies reported the presence of the relation between the phonological awareness and musical abilities. Our main goal was to examine this relation with the Test of the phonological awareness and the Test of musical abilities on 67 Slovene preschool children, aged from 5 to 6. We also wanted to investigate the differences between boys (N = 36) and girls (N = 31) and the differences between two age groups (aged from 5 to 5.5 years, N = 32, and from 5.5 to 6 years, N = 35). The results confirmed the connection between musical abilities and the phonological awareness. They also indicated that the recognition of the first and the last phoneme is related to melodic awareness and that phoneme merging is mainly related to rhythm awareness. No significant differences were found between male and female children or between the groups of the children of different ages.

Keywords

• early childhood
• language development
• speech development
• phonological awareness
• musical ability