View Content #6091
| Contentid | 6091 |
|---|---|
| Content Type | 1 |
| Title | News Article: Music Training Aids Language Development |
| Body | From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070312152003.htm Music Training 'Tunes' Human Auditory System March 13, 2007 A newly published study by Northwestern University researchers suggests that Mom was right when she insisted that you continue music lessons. The study, which will appear in the April issue of Nature Neuroscience, is the first to provide concrete evidence that playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem's sensitivity to speech sounds. This finding has broad implications because it applies to sound encoding skills involved not only in music but also in language. Using a novel experimental design, the researchers presented the Mandarin word "mi" to 20 adults as they watched a movie. Half had at least six years of musical instrument training starting before the age of 12. The other half had minimal (less than 2 years) or no musical training. All were native English speakers with no knowledge of Mandarin, a tone language. As the subjects watched the movie, the researchers used electrophysiological methods to measure and graph the accuracy of their brainstem ability to track the three differently pitched "mi" sounds. "Even with their attention focused on the movie and though the sounds had no linguistic or musical meaning for them, we found our musically trained subjects were far better at tracking the three different tones than the non-musicians," says Wong, director of Northwestern's Speech Research Laboratory and assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders. Read the entire article at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070312152003.htm . |
| Source | Science Daily |
| Inputdate | 2007-04-23 12:10:58 |
| Lastmodifieddate | 2007-04-23 12:10:58 |
| Expdate | Not set |
| Publishdate | 2007-04-23 00:00:00 |
| Displaydate | Not set |
| Active | 1 |
| Emailed | 1 |
| Isarchived | 1 |
