Music Ability is Related to Literacy Skills

Evidence exists that listening to music can facilitate learning to read, probably by increasing children's awareness of speech sounds, which is important in learning to "sound out" words. Two other relationships of music to reading have been found by Sheila Douglas and Peter Willatts of the University of Dundee, Scotland.

Writing in the Journal of Research in Reading (1994, 17, 99-107), they reported on correlations between musical abilities and reading achievement. Seventy-eight boys and girls (average age eight years) were tested on vocabulary, reading, and spelling and also on some of their musical skills, e.g., ability to detect slight differences among rhythms. The authors found a significant correlation between rhythm performance and both reading and spelling. Because correlations alone do not show a causal relationship, they also ran a small study on the effects of a six month program of music instruction designed to develop auditory, visual and motor skills; control students received instruction designed to develop their discussion skills (e.g., descriptive, imaginative and comparative). At the end of six months, the music students showed a significant improvement in reading compared to the controls, who did not change. These findings suggest that music instruction can cause an improvement in reading.