Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Brain Sciences
Abstract
Musical training has been shown to have a positive influence on a variety of skills, including auditory-based tasks and nonmusical cognitive and executive functioning tasks; however, because previous investigations have yielded mixed results regarding the relationship between musical training and these skills, the purpose of this study was to examine and compare the auditory processing skills of children who receive focused, daily musical training with those with more limited, generalized musical training. Sixteen typically developing children (second–fourth grade) from two different schools receiving different music curricula were assessed on measures of pitch discrimination, temporal sequencing, and prosodic awareness. The results indicated significantly better scores in pitch discrimination abilities for the children receiving daily, focused musical training (School 1) compared to students attending music class only once per week, utilizing a more generalized elementary school music curriculum (School 2). The findings suggest that more in-depth and frequent musical training may be associated with better pitch discrimination abilities in children. This finding is important given that the ability to discriminate pitch has been linked to improved phonological processing skills, an important skill for developing spoken language and literacy. Future investigations are needed to determine whether the null findings for temporal sequencing and prosodic awareness can be replicated or may be different for various grades and tasks for measuring these abilities.
First Page
982
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11080982
Publication Date
7-24-2021
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Flagge, A.G.; Neeley, M.E.; Davis, T.M.; Henbest, V.S. A Preliminary Exploration of Pitch Discrimination, Temporal Sequencing, and Prosodic Awareness Skills of Children Who Participate in Different School-Based Music Curricula. Brain Sci. 2021, 11, 982. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11080982
Comments
Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL 36688, USA; men1821@jagmail.southalabama.edu (M.E.N.); taradavis@southalabama.edu (T.M.D.); vhenbest@southalabama.edu (V.S.H.) * Correspondence: aflagge@southalabama.edu
Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).