ScienceDaily (Mar. 16,
2009) — Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition
involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical
skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with
their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published in the
journal Psychology of Music.
According
to authors Joseph M Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University, USA,
data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition
and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school
performance in language and literacy.
Studying children the two US elementary schools, one of which
routinely trained children in music and one that did not, Piro and Ortiz aimed
to investigate the hypothesis that children who have received keyboard
instruction as part of a music curriculum increasing in difficulty over
successive years would demonstrate significantly better performance on measures
of vocabulary and verbal sequencing than students who did not receive keyboard
instruction.
Several studies have reported positive
associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical
(eg, linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. The authors
say there are similarities in the way that individuals interpret music and
language and “because neural response to music is a widely distributed system
within the brain…. it would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing
networks for music and language behaviors, namely reading, located in both
hemispheres of the brain would overlap.”
The aim of
this study was to look at two specific reading subskills – vocabulary and
verbal sequencing – which, according to the authors, are “are cornerstone
components in the continuum of literacy development and a window into the
subsequent successful acquisition of proficient reading and language skills
such as decoding and reading comprehension.”
Using a
quasi-experimental design, the investigators selected second-grade children
from two school sites located in the same geographic vicinity and with similar
demographic characteristics, to ensure the two groups of children were as
similar as possible apart from their music experience.
Children in
the intervention school (n=46) studied piano formally for a period of three
consecutive years as part of a comprehensive instructional intervention
program. Children attending the control school (n=57) received no formal
musical training on any musical instrument and had never taken music lessons as
part of their general school curriculum or in private study. Both schools
followed comprehensive balanced literacy program that integrate skills of
reading, writing, speaking and listening.
All
participants were individually tested to assess their reading skills at the
start and close of a standard 10-month school year using the Structure of
Intellect (SOI) measure.
Results analyzed at the end of the year showed that the
music-learning group had significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores
than did the non-music-learning control group. This finding, conclude the
authors, provides evidence to support the increasingly common practice of
“educators incorporating a variety of approaches, including music, in their
teaching practice in continuing efforts to improve reading achievement in
children”.
However,
further interpretation of the results revealed some complexity within the
overall outcomes. An interesting observation was that when the study began, the
music-learning group had already experienced two years of piano lessons yet
their reading scores were nearly identical to the control group at the start of
the experiment.
So, ask the
authors, “If the children receiving piano instruction already had two years of
music involvement, why did they not significantly outscore the musically naïve
students on both measures at the outset?”
Addressing previous findings showing that music instruction has
been demonstrated to exert cortical changes in certain cognitive areas such as
spatial-temporal performance fairly quickly, Piro and Ortiz propose three
factors to explain the lack of evidence of early benefit for music in the
present study.
First,
children were tested for their baseline reading skills at the beginning of the
school year, after an extended holiday period. Perhaps the absence of any music
instruction during a lengthy summer recess may have reversed any earlier
temporary cortical reorganization experienced by students in the music group, a
finding reported in other related research. Another explanation could be that
the duration of music study required to improve reading and associated skills
is fairly long, so the initial two years were not sufficient.
A third
explanation involves the specific developmental time period during which
children were receiving the tuition. During the course of their third year of
music lessons, the music-learning group was in second grade and approaching the
age of seven. There is evidence that there are significant spurts of brain
growth and gray matter distribution around this developmental period and,
coupled with the increased complexity of the study matter in this year, brain
changes that promote reading skills may have been more likely to accrue at this
time than in the earlier two years.
“All of this
adds a compelling layer of meaning to the experimental outcomes, perhaps
signaling that decisions on ‘when’ to teach are at least as important as ‘what’
to teach when probing differential neural pathways and investigating their
associative cognitive substrates,” note the authors.
“Study of how
music may also assist cognitive development will help education practitioners
go beyond the sometimes hazy and ill-defined ‘music makes you smarter’ claims and
provide careful and credible instructional approaches that use the rich and
complex conceptual structure of music and its transfer to other cognitive
areas,” they conclude.
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