Pre-reading skills are a prerequisite for successfully mastering the initial reading within formal education that begins in the first grade of elementary school. Listening and visual processing are the basic abilities that a child needs to acquire in order to master the reading skills. Auditory processing, besides being important for language development, and along with visual processing for reading development, is also crucial for the development of phonological awareness, which is then crucial for successfully mastering the initial reading. When a child becomes aware that the sentence is made of words, and words of syllables, and syllables of phonemes (sounds), then we can say that a child has developed phonological awareness. Numerous scientific studies in music and music education have confirmed the positive effect of music on the general development of children. The positive influence was confirmed in cognitive, psychomotor, social and emotional aspects of development. Musical activities and musical motivation, during the time in which children intensively master the language, affect the development of language skills and phonological awareness and increase the sense of rhythm. The aim of this paper was to identify changes in the development of phonological awareness under the influence of musical motivation in pre-school children. By random selection, the children were divided into experimental and control group. In the experimental group the level of phonological awareness with the introduction of musical motivation was investigated, while in the control group the development of phonological awareness without introducing musical motivation was followed. The study involved children attending kindergarten Radost in Split. The sample consists of a total of N=28 children, equally divided in two groups, thereof 6 boys and 8 girls were in the experimental group, and 8 boys and 6 girls in the control group. The results obtained by this research suggest that children achieve better results at the final than on the initial testing, as well as that children from the experimental group show a greater degree of progress within their group at the final test compared to the control group. Also, we have come to some compelling data - that the children covered by this research are more successful in solving more demanding tasks of phonological awareness than in solving the more simple ones. The results obtained are of limited relevance because of the small sample size and the short period of time in which the research was conducted, so we cannot make global conclusions based on the results obtained. We believe that the data would be more relevant if the testing was carried out on a larger number of examinees over a longer period of time (one pedagogical year), respectively it would be good for research to begin at the beginning of a pedagogical year (in September) when children enter pre-school education program and last until the end of the pedagogical year (until June).