Relating pitch awareness to phonemic awareness in children: implications for tone-deafness and dyslexia
Date
2011
Authors
Loui, Psyche
Kroog, Kenneth
Zuk, Jennifer
Winner, Ellen
Schlaug, Gottfried
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
P. Loui, K. Kroog, J. Zuk, E. Winner, G. Schlaug. 2011. "Relating pitch awareness to phonemic awareness in children: implications for tone-deafness and dyslexia.." Front Psychol, Volume 2:111. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00111
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.
Description
License
Copyright: © 2011 Loui, Kroog, Zuk, Winner and Schlaug. This is an open-access article subject to a non-exclusive license between the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and other Frontiers conditions are complied with.