Relações entre prática musical, habilidades auditivas e metalingüísticas de crianças de cinco anos

Abstract

It is believed that musical practice is a factor that improves auditory skills and the development of childrens metalinguistic skills. The aims of this study were to investigate the relations among these variables and to compare the results of the Auditory Processing Simplified Assessment, Phonological Awareness Test and Audience-Listening Task between groups of five-year-old children with and without musical practice. This was a descriptive-comparative cross-sectional design study with non-probability sampling, among groups of five-year-old children, with and without musical practice. The selection criteria adopted required full phonological acquisition assessed by the Phonological Assessment of Child and the presence of cochlear-palpebral reflex. 56 children were selected and separated in two different groups: study group (n = 30) and control group (n = 26). The first stage of the study involved the application of a questionnaire to characterize the sample, analyzed by the Chi-square test, which defined the explanatory variables with statistically significant differences between groups. The second phase of the study considered the tests of sound localization in five directions, sequential memory for verbal and non-verbal sounds with three and four sound stimuli, phonological awareness test (tasks of syllabic synthesis, phonemic synthesis, rhyming, phonemic segmentation and phonemic exclusion) and musical audience-listening task. The data analysis was performed using the Mann-Whitney nonparametric test to compare the performance of each group in the tests and tasks evaluated. In order to estimate the association between the results and the explanatory variables, multiple binary logistic regressions procedures were performed. The associations were considered statistically significant when the results showed a significance level of 95% (p-value 0.05). At the first part of the data analysis, it was observed a statistically significant difference between groups in the following characteristics: maternal education, age that the child first went to school and the habit of listening to classical music. These variables were selected as comparison between groups and were included in the multiple binary logistic regression analysis. In the second stage, there was a statistically significant difference between the results of the sequential memory for verbal and non-verbal sounds with four sound stimuli tests, phonological awareness tasks of phonemic synthesis, rhyming, phonemic exclusion and musical audience-listening task. The binary multiple logistic regression analysis showed that, except for the sequential memory test for verbal sounds with four sound stimuli, the difference in performance on tests and tasks evaluated was associated with statistically significance only to the musical practice of the subjects. The musical practice of five-year-old children is associated with auditory processing skills, phonological awareness and music audience-listening tasks, with statistical significance and should be considered as a therapeutic practice in speech and language therapy.