“Armonia” project: Musical rhythmic activities to sustain linguistic inclusion in kindergartens, supported by technology

The ARMONIA project aims to promote inclusion in the pre-school context by overcoming language barriers. This objective calls for health and education operators to work together in a network by exploiting technologies and new scientific knowledge. Technology offers increasingly efficient tools for the early detection of potential fragilities in language development, even in children whose first language is not Italian. The scientific research has reported that the training of rhythmic-musical skills is a promising tool to enhance language development, especially when proposed at early ages and in ecological contexts. The aim of the ARMONIA project is to grow a network of cooperation between kindergartens, families and health specialists aimed at enhancing children’s communication and language skills through rhythmic-musical activities offered within the school context via the digital platform MuLiMi.218 pre-school children participated in the study, including monolingual children without (n = 106) and with communication and language fragilities (n = 40), and non-native Italian-speaking children (n = 72). All children were assessed at three time-points during the school year by means of a battery of tests implemented on the MuLiMi digital platform investigating verbal (vocabulary and receptive grammar skills, new word learning, non-word repetition) and non-verbal (discrimination of rhythms and rhythmic synchronization) skills. In addition, information was collected from teachers and parents via questionnaires. The musical rhythmic activities were proposed via the MuLiMi platform. The activities, carried out at school by appropriately trained teachers, covered the following areas: non-linguistic and linguistic acoustic processing, prosodic processing, and rhythmic synchronization.The study is still ongoing. Immediate benefits are expected for the children involved in the empowerment activities at school. Benefits are also expected for the extended school community: the school-family-health network created within the project could help the early identification of critical situations to be monitored, and the use of empowerment activities could contribute to the reduction of disadvantage situations and to a better integration of children and their families in the pre-school context.

Keywords: ; Communication and language skills; Pre-school context; Bilingualism; New technologies; Rhythmic-musical activities

Chiara Cantiani, Chiara Dondena, Roberta Agostoni, Maria Luisa Lorusso, Progetto Armonia: attività ritmico-musicali per l'inclusione linguistica nella scuola d'infanzia supportati dalla tecnologia in "RICERCHE DI PSICOLOGIA" 2/2024, pp 49-62, DOI: 10.3280/rip2024oa18581