Language Skills

Musicians are said to have better language skills, and scientific studies have backed that up, but it's not clear why that might be the case. Now a study of 74 Chinese kindergartners suggests six months of piano lessons can heighten the brain's response to changes in pitch. And kids who got piano lessons were also better at telling apart two similar-sounding Mandarin words, which contained different consonants than were students who got extra reading training or who just went through regular kindergarten. The results are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Mandarin is a tonal language, the famous example being the word ma, which can mean mother" or "horse, depending on its pitch. So might musical training translate better to Mandarin than it would to English Uh, yeah, it's possible it influences the results. Robert Desimone, a neuroscientist at the McGovern Institute at MIT. But he says other studies do back up the fact that music lessons benefit language learners, even in countries without tonal languages. What our study added on top of that was also some idea of the neural basis.