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Sound therapy and literacy difficulties
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Greenpark School in Tauranga participated in a preliminary research study in 2008 to determine the effectiveness of sound therapy as an intervention for children with literacy difficulties.
 | | Greenpark School students undertaking listening therapy.
Photo courtesy Bay of Plenty Times |
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Led by Rosemary Murphy of the Developmental Learning Centre, the study explored the effect of sound therapy on literacy. Murphy had noticed that most children with learning and behavioural difficulties have an underlying auditory processing difficulty which is largely undiagnosed.
Sound therapy programmes are used worldwide to treat individuals of all ages with auditory processing difficulties. The programmes use high quality classical music treated with a number of psycho acoustical techniques, such as filtration, gating and frequency enhancement. A progressive sequence of frequencies, from low to high, is delivered to the listener via high quality headphones to ensure that the children are processing the entire range of frequencies. In this process any gaps in the child’s ability to process certain sounds are filled, and the child’s overall auditory processing of language is improved.
A group of 24 children were selected by teachers because of their learning difficulties, which included persistent difficulties in reading, writing and spelling, as well as some behavioural issues related to poor listening such as restlessness, distractibility, dreaminess, forgetting instructions, frequently requiring repetition, poor short term memory and difficulty keeping up in class.
The children were split into two groups for the study with 12 children between the ages of seven and 10 years listening to the treated music for half an hour every day, over a period of two terms. A further 12 matched children were selected as a control group.
All 24 children were tested prior to beginning the study, and again at the end, for reading and spelling ages, and a number of auditory processing skills such as auditory memory, discrimination between similar sounding words and the ability to hear correctly what a speaker is saying when there is background noise in the classroom. A listening behaviours checklist was also filled out by the teachers for each child before the study began and then again afterwards.
The results
The results have been very interesting with a number of gains made in the group using sound therapy such as:
• An increase in reading age of 15.5 months in the therapy group, as opposed to a six month increase in the control group, using the McKenzie Sentence Reading Test.
• A 10+ month increase in the Neale Reading Accuracy test compared to a five month gain in the control group.
• In the Neale Reading Comprehension test the therapy group showed a nine month gain compared to a seven month gain in the control group.
• The Schonell Spelling assessment showed the sound therapy group to have improved by an average of 11 months compared to seven months in the control group.
• In the behavioural observations made by teachers there was almost two times the level of improvement in the therapy group.
• In auditory processing tests, such as telling the difference between similar sounding words and perceiving the sounds within words, the results showed improvements of between 10-27 percentile points in all areas in the therapy group. The control group improved in two areas only and these were significantly less than that of the therapy group.
In conclusion sound therapy is an effective intervention tool for children with literacy difficulties in schools, raising reading ages much more quickly than with the usual interventions alone. The study also showed increased improvements in a wide range of classroom behaviours and overall auditory processing skills. |
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