Auditory Training and its Effect on the Phonemic Awareness Development of Individuals with Dyslexia Who Have a Deficit in Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

The purpose of this case study was to determine if an auditory, music-related, intervention connected to phonemic awareness development impacted the phonological and phonemic awareness abilities of an individual with dyslexia who had a deficit in phonemic awareness.Phonemic awareness requires the individual to (a) isolate individual sounds, (b) identify common sounds in words, (c) categorize sounds that sound similar or different, (d) blend individual sounds together, (e) segment words into the individual sounds, and (f) the ability to delete a given sound in a word and blend the remaining sounds together to create a new word (Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster, Yaghoub-Zadeh, and Shanahan, 2001).Auditory training in this study required the participant to discriminate and isolate between sounds, distinguish between qualities of sound through major and minor chords, and included auditory memory tasks, which required the participant to remember and recall auditory information for a span of 5 to 30 seconds.Auditory examples were all played on an acoustic piano.One college student over the age of 18, who was previously diagnosed with dyslexia, was used for this study.Single subject research, A-B method was used to compare pre-phonemic awareness abilities to post-phonemic awareness abilities after the completion of the intervention.The Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization (LAC-3) and the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP) were used as the formal assessment instruments.After completing five auditory interventions, the participant demonstrated moderate growth and gains in the area of phonemic awareness and in particular in the iv area of auditory memory.The final assessments revealed that the participant increased in his phonemic awareness abilities as demonstrated by the increase in percentile rankings.This study has demonstrated that an auditory intervention using non-linguist sounds might be an effective method for increasing phonemic awareness abilities in individuals with dyslexia who have a phonological and phonemic awareness deficit.v Dedicated to all of those who relish the power of music.vi