The relationship between musical training and reading comprehension in children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder in which regarded as a spectrum disorder because of its wide range of types and severity. Researchers have found that musical training has a positive effect on the learning of typically developing (TD) children. However, there has been little research on the effect of musical training on reading performance among individuals with ASD. Given that this population group has the tendency to focus on and remember local details over global form or global meaning based on their cognitive style, it raises the question of whether musical training is one of the moderators for enhancing their reading performance, especially when comprehending the global context similar to the effects on TD children. With reference to the positive effect of musical training on the learning of TD children, it is valuable to investigate the association between musical training and the reading comprehension of children with ASD. Previous studies on ASD and reading comprehension have been conducted predominantly in Western societies and in alphabetic languages. However, little research has been done on this subject in Chinese communities, where tonal languages are prevalent. Chinese is a tonal language that uses an orthographic system and its characters cannot be decoded directly into sounds in the same way as they are in English. Collecting evidence on ASD and reading comprehension within Chinese communities would facilitate our understanding of the underlying mechanisms in relation to their learning. The present study examined the reading comprehension performance of children with ASD and compared it with that of their TD counterparts to identify the possible variables that may relate to their reading comprehension performance. A series of tests, namely tone identification test, Embedded Figure Test, homograph reading test, music test, homophone test and reading test, were conducted with 52 children with ASD and 50 TD children, aged from 9 to 12 years old with Cantonese as their native language. These children were further divided into musically trained and untrained groups. The results indicated that the musically trained group performed better when identifying tones. Despite TD children performing slightly better in the tone identification test than children with ASD, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups. Children with ASD performed significantly better than the TD group in the visual–spatial domain. However, no significant difference was obtained in the auditory domain, although the trend showed that the musically trained group performed slightly better than the musically untrained group. Regarding their understanding of context in language, the TD group performed significantly better than the ASD group in their homograph reading and comprehension of sentences with homophones, although there was no interaction between ASD and musical training. Overall, the results of this study demonstrated a positive trend that musically trained children with ASD performed better in reading comprehension. Implications for the reading performance of musically trained children with ASD and future research into the impact of musical training on the learning of children with ASD were discussed.