The Rhythm of Reading

As arts education programs are getting cut, more educators and researchers are coming forward with evidence showing that music training is not only an enjoyable activity for students, but can help improve their reading skills as well.

Nina Kraus described music as a model for learning; many of the skills involved in practicing music are used when reading. From a biological point of view, in both reading and music, the acoustic characteristics of the sound of language and of music are encoded in the same way. Therefore, perhaps training ourselves to attend to some of these characteristics and distinguish between them in music will improve our abilities to do so with language.

Dr. Kraus discussed several skills that are important both in reading and in music. The first is response consistency, or the ability of neurons to fire in synchrony. The next skill is the ability to distinguish between important sounds and sounds to tune out in the background. It has been shown that children with dyslexia struggle with this particular skill. A third skill is using the patterns of sound and its rhythm to determine what information is meaningful.

A researcher in Germany, Iris Rautenberg, also looked at this last skill. In this study, a group of 159 German-speaking school children were divided into three groups. The first group received nine months of musical training, the second group received nine months of visual arts training, and the third group did not receive any training. At the end of the nine-month period, the students who received musical training had improved reading abilities, measured by their accuracy and prosody (their rhythm, stress, and intonation). However these improvements were only linked to improved rhythmic skills, not their ability to distinguish between different pitches and melodies. It would be interesting to see if this study would get the same results for different languages that do not emphasize timing as much as German does.

This study did not specifically look at students with dyslexia, though both Dr. Kraus and Dr. Rautenberg discuss implications for dyslexia in their work. This could be a future direction for continued research on the benefits of music education.

Kraus, N., & Chandrasekaran, B. (2010). Music training for the development of auditory skills. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(8), 599-605.

Rautenberg, I. (2013). The effects of musical training on the decoding skills of German‐speaking primary school children. Journal of Research in Reading.