[Musical-rhythmic discrimination ability and recall in children with reading and spelling disorders]

Thirty 9- to 11-year-old children of normal intelligence, who are poor readers and spellers, were tested using shortened series of problems of the Seashore test of musical talents as well as Colured Progressive Matrices. Also, the children had to write from dictation using Kossakowski's table of words. All of the problems, with the exception of writing from dictation, were also presented to, and solved by, a correspondingly composed reference group of thirty normal schoolchildren. There were found considerable statistically significant group differences especially in respect of the ability to absorb successions of tones and distinguish between different tone colors and intensities of sound. The importance of these results to the development of methods of early diagnosis is discussed in detail.