Pitch Processing and Phonological Awareness.

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to observe performance in the processing of pitch in relation to phonological awareness performance in kindergarten students. Thirteen students (N = seven girls, six boys), registered into the preschool program of the Quebec school, made up the sample pilot study (average age = five years and six months). The tonal test from the Primary Measures of Music Audialion (PMMA, Gordon, 1979) was used to measure the performance in pitch processing. Phonological awareness skills were measured with the help of l'Epreuve de melaphonologie by Armand and Montesinos-Gelet (2001). In this research, the rhythm test (PMMA, Gordon, 1979) was also used as a control task. The results show a significant link between pitch awareness and phonological awareness performance. They also show that there is no relation between rhythm perception and phonological awareness skills. In the past few years, many researchers have presented studies showing the benefits of music at the cognitive, kinesthetic and socioemotional levels (Atterbury, 1985;Costa-Giomi, 1999; Lamb & Gregory, 1993;Probst, 1985; Rauscher & Zupan, 2000). Despite this growing interest, few specialists have attempted to establish a link between performance in the processing of pitch and academic success, notably in the development of reading strategies. In contribution to this field, the present pilot study examines if'the performance in the processing of pitch is related to phonological awareness performance at the kindergarten level. In this way, the results may be useful to other researchers in structuring their theories and designs. It is a well-known fact that a child's sensorial experiences begins while still in the womb. Some studies in fetal perception reveal that during pregnancy, the child is already reacting to words and songs that are familiar (Lafuente, Grifol, Segarra, Soriano, Goba, & Montesinos, 1997). Trehub (2001) has even demonstrated that an eight-month child is capable of making the distinction between consonant and dissonant (quarter tone) melodic sound sequences. Between the ages of one and five, children seem to develop a musical syntax that allows them to more or less classify musical sounds according to pitch. They also tend to associate sound pitch to certain types of voices, certain objects, or particular eircumstances. This suggests that pitch awareness is an innate skill that allows frequency differentiation between two sounds having the same duration, intensity and even the same tone (Vignal, 1990). According to Gordon (1971, 1979), children of about five or six years of age should be able to represent mentally musical units, to compare various sound sequences and judge if they are similar or different. This phenomenon might also be linked to language acquisition. At the linguistic level, children adopt a positional spatial relation and express considerable interest in the order of words and in the position of the language units (Vion, 1978). Several researchers (Ehri, 1980, 1992; Ehri and Wilce, 1987a; Reitsma, 1983) have demonstrated that phonological awareness could have a positive influence on the learning of oral and written language as early as preschool age. Phonological awareness would allow the child to establish distance in relation to language as a means of communication, to recognize speech as a sequence of discrete units of various sizes, and to perform certain operations with these units (Casalisand Lecocq, 1992). The manipulation and analysis of a word's sound units therefore would have a positive influence on writing skills. According to some specialists (Ehri, 1992;Rack,IIulme,SnowlingW Reitsma, 1983) phonological awareness exercises would allow the preservation of a mnemonic trace of phonemes and graphemes. In addition to developing phonological memory, these exercises would allow the observation of the place letters occupy in a word. …

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