A Preliminary Exploration of Pitch Discrimination, Temporal Sequencing, and Prosodic Awareness Skills of Children Who Participate in Different School-Based Music Curricula

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.

Music Training and Nonmusical Abilities

“…The EEG findings were similarly circumscribed: Musicians had reduced P50 amplitude for the intelligible stimuli; for P50 and N1, stimulus type did not affect EEG responses for musicians, but it did for nonmusicians, with greater negative amplitude for unintelligible stimuli. Null associations with music training have also been reported when second to fifth graders were tested for prosodic awareness (Flagge et al 2021), 11-to 14-year-olds determined the emotion conveyed by nonsense words (Başkent et al 2018), and young adults made forced-choice judgments about the emotion expressed by semantically neutral sentences (Park et al 2015). The use of glides rather than discrete pitches in speech likely contributes to poor performance and inconsistent findings (Haiduk et al 2020).…”

Auditory Processing in Musicians, a Cross-Sectional Study, as a Basis for Auditory Training Optimization

“…These tests were administered to all musicians and non-musicians, to assess speech perception, temporal resolution, short-term and working memory, and speech comprehension with rhythm effect. We also conducted a Frequency Discrimination Limen test (DFL) which was created based on other Frequency Discrimination Limen and Just Noticeable Difference tests [91,[108][109][110]. All tests were administered to all participants in a sound-treated room via headphones (TDH-50P) at 60 dB HL through a CD player and a GSI 61 audiometer.…”