Relating Pitch Awareness to Phonemic Awareness in Children: Implications for Tone-Deafness and Dyslexia

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.

Impaired categorical perception of lexical tones in Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics

“…Nan, Sun and Peretz (2010) found that amusic Mandarin speakers performed worse than controls in a tone identification task involving monosyllabic and bisyllabic words. In addition, it has been shown that individuals with deficits in musical pitch processing also have impaired phonemic awareness (Jones, Lucker, Zalewski, Brewer & Drayna, 2009a;Loui, Kroog, Zuk, Winner & Schlaug, 2011). This suggests that the deficits with Mandarin tones found by Nan et al may be related to reduced phonemic awareness in amusia.…”

Phonological processing in Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia

“…In particular, they are compatible with the reduced intrinsic connectivity in the auditory cortices, compromised structural integrity of the arcuate fasciculus, and other anomalies in the fronto-temporal pathways that have been found to be featured in the amusic brain (e.g., Albouy et al, 2013;Loui et al, 2009). Considering that developmental disorders with similar behavioral manifestations, such as amusia and dyslexia, may have a shared, although not identical neural basis (Loui et al, 2011), future studies may explore the exact causal role played by the phonological deficit by examining the commonalities of these developmental disorders at the behavioral level, and by comparing their structural and functional similarities at the neurological level.…”

“…It is often the case that individuals' perception and production abilities are well correlated (Loui et al, 2008;Loui et al, 2011;Hutchins and Peretz, 2012). But a mismatch can happen in individuals with amusia, where intact production performance can be demonstrated with impaired perception (e.g., Loui et al, 2008;Nan et al, 2010).…”

How Learning a Musical Instrument Affects the Development of Skills

“…While we cannot 1 In addition, numerous studies in the fields of psychology and music education detect positive correlations between playing music and cognitive skill development. They find that music practice or training is associated with a higher IQ (Vaughn and Winner, 2000), an enhanced reading ability (Besson et al, 2007;Loui et al, 2011), increased attention (Shahin et al, 2008) and a better memory (Ho et al, 2003). Some of these relations remain after holding basic socio-demographic background characteristics constant (Schellenberg, 2006;Southgate and Roscigno, 2009).…”