Tuning the Brain
/Summary of research: Language Development
Kathleen M. Howland, Ph.D.
Music study group for Northborough-Southborough school district
It was long thought that music was a by-product of our evolutionary history. Some bit of a tag along to the magnificence of language and cognition. What neuroscience is now looking at is the essence of music in tuning the brain to perceive, identify and analyze sounds in preparation for learning language.
Music can tune the brain to learn language because the changes in the auditory signal are slower in music than they are in speech. Let’s take the last phrase ‘more complex than music.’ It only takes 3.22 seconds to say that phrase and yet it contains 20 distinct speech sounds. If you took the same amount of time in music, you would hear only 1 to perhaps several notes.
Music training has also demonstrated increases in language scores. This is known as far transfer where study in one area impacts another without explicit bridges of training. Work in this area comes from the lab of Gottfried Schlaug (www.musicianbrain.com) at Beth Israel in Boston. In the summary of the article, Forgeard et al. (2008) noted that the duration of music training predicted the outcomes in vocabulary, non reasoning skills as well as auditory and motor skills. So the longer you plan an instrument, the more gains there are to be made that both relate to making music (auditory, motor) and to non-musical realms (vocabulary, reasoning).
Specific language impairment (SLI) is a communication disorder that interferes with the development of language skills in children who have no hearing loss or intellectual disabilities. It is evident in young children and very challenging to remediate. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NICDC) states that it is one of the most common developmental disorders, affecting approximately 7 to 8 percent of children in kindergarten. The impact of SLI usually persists into adulthood. Here is a research article summary about the importance of music in language development:
Language and music share many properties, with a particularly strong overlap for prosody (prosody is the melodic quality of our voices). Prosodic cues are generally regarded as crucial for language acquisition. Previous research has indicated that children with SLI fail to make use of these cues. As processing of prosodic information involves similar skills to those required in music perception, we compared music perception skills (melodic and rhythmic-melodic perception and melody recognition) in a group of children with SLI (𝑁 = 29, five-year-olds) to two groups of controls, either of comparable age (𝑁 = 39, five-year-olds) or of age closer to the children with SLI in their language skills and about one year younger (𝑁 = 13, four-year-olds). Children with SLI performed in most tasks below their age level, closer matching the performance level of younger controls with similar language skills. This data strengthens the view of a strong relation between language acquisition and music processing. This might open a perspective for the possible use of musical material in early diagnosis of SLI and of music in SLI therapy. (Sallat & Jentschke, 2015)
Bibliography
Forgeard M, Winner E, Norton A, Schlaug G. (2008). Practicing a musical instrument in childhood is associated with enhanced verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning. PLoS ONE, 3:e3566
Shallat, S. & Jentschke, S. (2015). Music Perception Influences Language Acquisition: Melodic and Rhythmic-Melodic Perception in Children with Specific Language Impairment. Behavioral Neurology
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/606470