音乐训练影响儿童语音意识的认知神经机制

The Cognitive and Neural Mechanism Underlying The Effect of Musical Training on Children’s Phonological Awareness

音乐是一种听觉艺术形式,在儿童教育和发展中,尤其是语言能力发展中扮演着重要角色。语音意识是个体感知识别、分析和运用语音的能力,是预测儿童语言读写能力的重要指标。本文梳理了近十年来音乐训练影响儿童语音意识的研究证据,并讨论了音乐训练可能促进语音意识的神经基础和解释模型。大量研究表明,音乐训练可以在行为水平提高儿童在语音意识测量任务上的成绩。此外,音乐训练从两方面影响语音加工的神经基础:一方面通过影响皮层下基本听觉神经通路与大脑听觉皮层,促进儿童前注意水平的语音感知能力;另一方面通过影响语音加工大脑区域间的功能连接,促进语音编码,强化语音加工的听觉-运动整合功能。相关神经机制为音乐训练促进儿童的语音意识提供了生物学基础。基于已有研究,本文提出综合的层级模型对音乐训练影响儿童语音意识的认知神经机制进行系统的解释,该模型认为音乐训练影响语音意识的认知神经机制分为3个层级:第一层级,音乐训练通过影响基本听觉神经通路促进了语音的基本听觉加工,其中节奏训练促进对语音时长信息的感知,音高训练促进对语音频率信息的感知;第二层级,音乐训练通过影响语音加工的神经网络,进一步促进语音编码,其中节奏训练主要促进辅音、韵脚和音节的识别和编码,音高训练促进元音、韵脚和音节的识别和编码;第三层级,音乐训练通过增强听觉与运动脑区之间的信息整合,增强语音运动表征,以及听觉-运动整合能力,进一步提高了语音表征的质量。该领域的研究不但可以揭示人类语言发展的认知神经机制,而且在儿童教育领域具有非常重要的现实意义和应用价值。

Music is an auditory art,which may play an important role in education and psychological development of children.Phonological awareness describes the ability to perceive,recognize,analyze,and manipulate phonological units,which is an important indicator to predict children’s literacy skills.This review summarized experimental studies on the effect of musical training on children’s phonological awareness in the last decade,and discussed the relevant neural basis and hypotheses.It has been demonstrated that musical training could not only promote children’s phonological awareness at the behavioral level,but also affect children’s phonological auditory processing ability at the pre-attention level.Music training may affect the neural basis of phonological processing from two aspects:on the one hand,it may affect children’s speech perception ability at the pre-attention level by strengthening the basic auditory neural pathway and the auditory cortex;on the other hand,it may affect the phonological coding and auditory-motor integration by enhancing the functional connectivity among regions related to phonological processing.The related neural mechanisms provide the biological basis for music training to promote children’s phonological awareness.Based on the existing researches and theoretical hypotheses,the review proposed a hierarchical model to explain the cognitive mechanism of the effect of music training on phonological awareness,which presents that there are three levels of the cognitive neural mechanisms of phonological awareness effected by musical training.The first level,musical training may promote the basic auditory processing of speech by strengthening the basic auditory neural pathways,in which training in rhythm may strengthen the perception of speech duration,and training in pitch may strengthen the perception of speech frequency.The second level,musical training may further promote speech coding by enhancing the neural networks for speech processing,in which training in rhythm promotes the recognition of consonant,rhyme,and syllable,training in pitch promotes the recognition of vowel,rhyme,and syllable.The third level,musical training may promote the speech motoric representation and auditory-motor integration by enhancing the interaction between auditory and motor cortex,further improve the quality of phonological representation.The potential theoretical significance of the effects of musical training on children’s phonological awareness was discussed in the context of revealing the cognitive neural mechanism and rules of human’s language development,and the potential application in the field of children’s education was also discussed.