Neurological Research Summary
- Language processing and rhythm processing have shared neurocognitive connections.
- Music training causes brain and behavioral changes in children that are not due to preexisting biological traits.
- Music-making and parental singing promote infants’ auditory neural processing and early language development.
- Music-making develops auditory processing; results in higher reading achievement.
- The association between rhythm perception and letter-sound knowledge is mediated through phonological awareness.
- Prosody perception and music perception are associated, especially related to rhythm.
- Children with developmental dyslexia have a rhythmic processing difference that affects auditory processing.
- Literacy modifies phonological coding and strengthens the functional and anatomical link between phonemic (sounds) and graphemic (visual) representations.
Research Studies Summary
- Children who cannot keep a steady beat usually struggle with reading.
- In pre-school-age children, phonological awareness, working memory, and rapid retrieval from long-term memory are related to music perception as well as to music production.
- Pitch awareness is correlated with phonemic awareness.
- Prosody in speaking is correlated with reading comprehension.
- Same-language subtitles (SLS) in music videos cause inescapable reading behavior and dramatically increase functional literacy.
- Music-making with infants improves social and communication development.
- Music-making using numbers increases achievement in counting backwards, reading and dictation of numbers, arithmetic, word-problem solving, fractions, and verbal working memory.
- Pre-school and elementary-age children who receive music instruction improve significantly in executive functions of inhibition, planning, and verbal intelligence.
- Music training for dyslexic children can improve auditory processing, prosodic and phonemic sensitivity, sequencing abilities, and auditory and temporal orienting of attention.
- Adults who played instruments as children have better attention, verbal memory, hearing, and speech processing.
- Musicians have better verbal abilities, second language learning, verbal short term/working memory, non-verbal reasoning, focus in noisy environments, and general intelligence.
