music improves language and memory
by Peter Lavelle
ABC Science Online (July 2003)
Learning an instrument can help children
improve their linguistic skills, and may
even help people recover from memory loss
after brain injury, researchers have found.
These are the findings of a study by psychologists
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in
the latest issue of the journal, Neuropsychology.
The study found that children who undergo
musical training have a better recall of
words than those who have none. And the
longer their period of musical training,
the more words they recall.
Led by psychologist Dr Agnes Chan, the team
studied a group of 90 schoolboys, aged 6
to 15, half of whom received music training
in their school's string orchestra for between
one and five years. The other half who had
no training. The boys were all tested for
verbal memory by reading them a list of
words and asking them to remember as many
as possible 10 minutes after the test, and
then 30 minutes after. They were then shown
a series of images, and asked to recall
these. Each student was tested three times.
The team found that students with musical
training recalled significantly more words
than the untrained students. After 30 minutes,
they still retained more words than the
control group. In addition, there was a
positive correlation between the length
of time the students had been learning and
how well they remembered words: the longer
they had been in training, the more words
they recalled. But there were no differences
between the two groups in recalling images.
The findings echo a similar 1998 study by
the same researchers and published in the
journal Nature of 60 female students at
University of Hong Kong, half of whom had
at least six years of musical training and
the other half with no training. All the
girls participating were given verbal and
visual memory tests. On the verbal test,
the musical students consistently out-scored
the others by an average of 16%.
How does music help a child to retain words?
Chan believes that learning music stimulates
the left temporal lobe, which processes
auditory input. This in turn encourages
the development of a part of the left temporal
lobe called the planum temporale, which
responsible for verbal memory. In this way,
verbal memory training happens as a sort
of 'by-product' of musical training.
A 1995 a study using magnetic resonance
imaging, or MRI, scanning showed that the
planum temporale is larger in the brains
of musicians than in non-musicians, she
said. When it comes to music training, it
is not the instrument or the type of music
but the actual process of learning that
helps verbal training, said Chan. She believes
the finding could be the basis of a new
approach to helping people with memory loss
following brain injury. It is also good
news for parents who are musically inclined. |
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