The Hypothesis
Because dyslexia is believed to be associated with problems processing sounds, improving a dyslexia’s musical skills will help treat their condition.
The Failure
New empirical evidence has revealed a lack of a link between musical skills and dyslexia. [source]
The Success
Learning that something isn’t the case and/or doesn’t work is learning nonetheless. Progress gets made by hypotheses confirmed and by hypotheses disconfirmed.
The article ventures beyond the “nope, no evidence,” finding. It included an explanation as to why the hypothesis likely failed:
Music and speech do overlap, but musical sounds and phonemes are not the same, the researchers explain. Musical tones are simply sounds, however, they are produced and can be heard without recourse to complex auditory analysis. Phonemes, in contrast, whether spoken or read, are abstractions of the units into which language might be broken down. They are purely symbolic and require significantly more interpretation to understand than simply hearing a sound. [bold mine]
Go science! Celebrate the valid. AND highlight the vacuous.
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Tags: critical thinking, language
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