A Study of Metrical Notes Durations Discrimination and Phonological Awareness for Children with Chinese Reading Difficulties

An increasing number of studies verify the co-relation between musical rhythmic perception and reading ability/developmental dyslexia in children whose mother tongue is English. This study investigates whether this relationship exists in a non-alphabetic language, Chinese. Seventy-eight Chinese-speaking children with and without reading difficulties (RD) were recruited to participate in a musical meter perception task, in which the participants were asked to discriminate the musical meters based on the note durations. The results show that Chinese-speaking children with RD performed significantly poorer on this task compared to their counterparts without RD. Moreover, their performance on the perception of musical meter with various note durations is closely related to their awareness of rhyme in Chinese speech, nonetheless it is not directly related to their ability in recognizing Chinese characters. The research concludes that there is a correlation between musical rhythmic recognition and rhyme awareness in speech and the two may share an underlying processing mechanism.