In Wednesday’s (1/9) Pacific Standard, Tom Jacobs writes, “Want your child to get better and better with words? Put a musical instrument in his or her hands. That’s the implication of a new paper from Germany, which confirms and augments research conducted in Canada, and Hong Kong. Across cultures, it appears, training on a musical instrument improves kids’ verbal memory. The results of an 18-month study suggest ‘a positive transfer effect from musical expertise onto speech and language processing,’ writes a research team led by Ingo Roden of Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany. In the journal Frontiers in Psychology, the researchers note that no similar effect was found for kids taking an enriched academic curriculum. The study featured 7- or 8-year-old children (37 boys, 36 girls), recruited from seven primary schools scattered around Germany. Twenty-five received special music training above and beyond the basic school curriculum. … Another 25 children, taken from ‘two primary schools that emphasized natural science skills,’ were given ‘enhanced education in mathematics and general studies’ over that same 18-month period. An additional 23 children received no additional instruction beyond the basic school curriculum. … ‘Across one and one-half years, children in the music group showed a greater increase on every measure of verbal memory than the natural science and control groups,’ the researchers report.”
Posted January 10, 2013
