Music education helps children who struggle with language.

This story on NPR caught my attention last month. Exciting research was presented at Neuroscience 2009 in Chicago in October that suggests that musicians’ auditory pathways are distinctly different from non-musicians.

Nina Kraus, scientist at Northwestern University, conducted a study comparing trained musicians to the general population in how they perceive and interpret sound. Each subject heard a person reciting simple sentence, but each time they heard it, there was increasing levels of background noise. Kraus’s team of researchers discovered that the musicians were able to pick out the voice more easily and accurately than the non-musician group.

Standard hearing tests, however, show that musicians and non-musicians ears have the same sensitivity. So what’s the difference?

It’s in the neural hearing system, Kraus says. Like a muscle, the brain gets stronger with use. “Musical experience can change how our brain interacts with sounds,” she says. “It’s almost like the brain is better able to pay attention to sound and [to] better extract meaning from sound.”  Musicians, and students of music, must pay close attention to qualities such as pitch, timing and tone. They also need to be able to listen for particular sounds amidst the cacophony of the orchestra, band or choir.

These aspects of sound are the ones that are particularly difficult for children struggling with language development. When given a simple test asking them to distinguish one sound from another, musicians excel, while people with dyslexia and other language problems do poorly. A study conducted by Dana Strait suggests that musical training could help these children who are struggling with language. “These kids seem to be impaired in the very areas that musicians excel,” says Ms. Strait. “Musical experience can change how our brain interacts with sounds”.

We as parents and teachers need to help these children in their muscle-building as much as we can. While cultivating musical home environment and bringing your child to Kindermusik classes won’t necessarily lead to raising a concert pianist, it seems that it is the best thing we can do for their ears and their language skills.

-posted by Miss Katie, who now understands why she gets so distracted in a room full of people!