Music as a tool for the early detection of dyslexia in children

For the first time, music has become a crucial instrument in the detection of dyslexia. This is the line of research on which Maria Rauschenberger, doctoral researcher of the Web Research Group (WRG) of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF is working, and with which she has won a Google Doctoral Consortium Scholarship, delivered to her during the 13^th Web for All (W4A) congress held in Montreal (Canada) from 11 to 13 April.

The aim of Rauschenberger’s research is to demonstrate that a fun activity such music can be used to detect children with dyslexia. The researcher has designed a web application called DysMusic with which she is planning to identify 10% of dyslexia among the children between the ages of 3 and 6 years still not diagnosed.

School failure and frustration with life are associated with a problem of dyslexia, often not identified

Dyslexia is a neurological learning disorder which hinders the ability to read and write and so early detection of this disorder is very important to prevent school failure and suffering in children’s lives. Early detection of this disorder allows developing strategies so that boys and girls can improve their reading comprehension and, above all, strengthen their self-confidence.

Rauschenberger, in an initial phase of her research, plans to identify the musical attributes she will use to distinguish between groups with and without dyslexia, to then use them in the design of her musical web application, a game based on the fact that people with dyslexia have bad short term memory. Thus, one of the experiments planned for her study will consist of asking children what was the sound they heard first, from a set of different musical fragments.

Multilinguistic methodology of Dytective combined with music

In a second phase, the researcher plans to adapt algorithms of the Dytective multilinguistic methodology to DysMusic. Rauschenberger has been working with the German version of Dytective, a tool to diagnose dyslexia recently developed by the team of the researcher Luz Rello, PhD by UPF, promoter of Change Dyslexia and now co-supervisor of Rauschenberger’s thesis together with Ricardo Baeza-Yates, director of the WRG.

According to Rauschenberger ”the next step of my research will be to design the architecture of the DysMusic language game, which will combine language and musical content leading up to a set of experiments through which it will be possible to tell a dyslexic person from someone who is not”, and this is especially aimed at early detection in children.

Reference work:

Maria Rauschenberger (2016), “DysMusic: Detecting Dyslexia by Web-based Games with Music Elements”, Doctoral Consortium, W4A, 16 April, Montreal (Canada).