Phonological awareness of schoolchildren after musical training

Abstract

Objective. To analyze the performance of school children in the skills of discrimination of sounds and phonological awareness regarding the components of rhyme, alliteration, and phonemic and syllabic synthesis, before and after a musical training of phonological awareness; to verify the generalization of responses; and to analyze the association of the studied skills with age. Method. The musical phonological intervention took place in rooms with groups of students aged between 6 and 10 years. Collective training and assessments were carried out through activities for the discrimination of sounds and phonological awareness. The performances obtained in the assessments performed before and after the musical intervention were compared. Results. After the musical phonological intervention, there was an improvement in phonological awareness performance of the youngest children, between 6 and 7 years, mainly in the syllabic and phonemic synthesis skills after the musical phonological training. For the phonemic synthesis ability, there was a generalization of the benefit of training for untrained stimuli. Age was associated with the performance of phonological awareness, except for the phonemic synthesis ability. Conclusion. The musical intervention of phonological awareness improved the syllabic and phonemic synthesis skills of younger children, and allowed generalization of the results, which highlights the importance of this type of stimulation of the precursor skills of written language. Only phonemic synthesis performance was not associated with the age of the children studied, therefore, the intervention, aimed at schoolchildren between 6 and 10 years old, positively influenced phonological performance, reducing the impact of age.