A study suggests a plausible neural basis for the enhanced language skills tied to music training. Music training has been tied to improved linguistic ability in children and adolescents, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. To probe the link, Robert Desimone and colleagues recruited 74 cognitively comparable Mandarin-speaking children, ages 4 to 5 years, with no previous music training from a kindergarten in Beijing, China. The authors assigned the children to three groups: one that received thrice-weekly 45-minute piano lessons for 6 months; one that received training in reading for the same time period; and a control group that received no training. One month after training, children who received piano training outperformed the other two groups on a Mandarin word-discrimination task based on consonant sounds. By contrast, both piano and reading training appeared to confer similar improvements in vowel-based word discrimination, compared to the control group. Improvements in word discrimination tied to piano training were mirrored by enhanced neural responses to changes in musical pitch and lexical tone, suggesting general improvements in sound processing ability. However, tests of IQ, attention, and working memory failed to reveal any broad enhancements in cognitive functions specifically tied to piano training. Thus, early music training might prove salutary to the development of brain regions implicated in processing pitch--a sound element common to music and language, according to the authors.
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Article #18-08412: "Piano training enhances the neural processing of pitch and improves speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children," by Yun Nan et al.
MEDIA CONTACT: Robert Desimone, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; e-mail: desimone@mit.edu
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences