Music Training Facilitates Language Learning

If you’re a parent or thinking of becoming a parent you likely want your kid(s) to excel in all aspects of life and become a better version of yourself. One of my favorite aspects of neuroscience research is the ability to identify what behaviors will yield the highest cognitive benefit by directly comparing brain region activity. This is a principle that can be applied to children and adults alike to encourage neural growth and inhibit age-related neural deficits. In this article we are going to look at music-training and how it can improve you and/or your child’s ability to learn language(s) by looking at the brain regions involved in both.

Basal Ganglia

The basal ganglia is located at the base of the forebrain and is involved in implicit memory and voluntary motor function (Nelson & Kreitzer, 2014). It plays multiple roles in speech and language, including the processing of semantics, syntax, prosody, and the motor aspect of speech (Pannese, Grandjean, & Frühholz, 2015). Deterioration of the basal ganglia in people with Parkinson’s Disease has been shown to lead to a disruption in prosodic processing, which controls the alterations of amplitude, frequency, and duration necessary for speech signaling (Pell, 1996). In a study focused on college-aged subjects, experienced music listeners and music majors showed a significantly increased activation in the basal ganglia and ventral striatum compared to inexperienced listeners (Chapin et al., 2010).

The basal ganglia has also been implicated in temporal processing, specifically the timing of motor movements (Harrington et al., 2011), which is highly important when staying on beat. Participants with Parkinson’s Disease and control participants were given a time perception task to judge which of two pairs of auditory or visual stimuli were longer in duration. Participants with Parkinson’s Disease off of medication displayed impaired time perception and abnormal activity in the striatum, insula, and parahippocampus. In a separate study, musically trained 7-17 year-old children displayed greater emotion recognition and shorter response times to emotional sentences than non-musicians, suggesting faster recognition in speech than people who are not musically trained (Dmitrieva, Gel’man, Zaitseva, & Orlov, 2006). It is apparent that the basal ganglia plays a role in temporal processing, and it is evidenced that music-training improves the processing time in children that receive music-training.

Superior Temporal Gyrus

The superior temporal gyrus (STG), which contains the auditory cortex, has previously been implicated in the neural representation of speech sounds, displaying different patterns of activation based on the specific acoustic characteristics of phonetic stimuli. Additionally, the superior temporal gyrus has shown a role in prosody decoding (Alba-Ferrara, Hausmann, Mitchell, & Weis, 2011).

In terms of language processing, a study assessing the role of the superior temporal gyrus in language reception found a positive correlation between superior temporal gyrus volume and the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-3) scores in controls, but no correlation in people with autism, suggesting a role of language processing in the STG (Bigler et al., 2007). The STG projects to the superior temporal sulcus, which integrates acoustic information and executes language comprehension (Beauchamp, 2015). It is plausible that stronger STG connections enhances the processing of acoustics and language in the superior temporal sulcus.

In a study on college-aged musicians and non-musicians, participants underwent two conditions, a passive listening condition and a distorted tune test, in which they were told to detect abnormalities in tunes. Musicians displayed higher superior temporal gyrus activation and more evened superior temporal gyrus activation across hemispheres than non-musicians during both conditions (Seung, Kyong, Woo, Lee, & Lee, 2005). Additionally, professional pianists have shown significantly greater activity in the middle temporal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, and supramarginal gyrus during both passive listening and a motor task of arbitrarily pressing soundless piano keys (Bangert et al., 2006), suggesting a link between music-training and the strength of connections within the STG.

Superior temporal gyral and hippocampal activation has been shown to be involved in long-term episodic and semantic memory retrieval (Groussard et al., 2010). Twenty musicians (half male, half female) and twenty nonmusicians (half male, half female) between the ages of 20-35 were tested on a familiarity task by judging the familiarity of melodies on a four-point scale while under fMRI (Groussard et al., 2010).

Musicians displayed significantly greater activation in the anterior portion of the hippocampus and the bilateral superior temporal areas, and showed significantly higher grey matter density in the left hippocampus, suggesting extensive music training increased brain plasticity (Groussard et al., 2010). Strange et al. demonstrated the role of the left anterior hippocampus in processing physical and semantic aspects of stimuli when participants learned an artificial grammar system and were presented with perceptually novel (different font) and semantically novel stimuli (1999). Results displayed left anterior hippocampal activity to both aspects of novelty (Strange, Fletcher, Henson, Friston, & Dolan, 1999). With this evidence, it can be argued that music-training leads to structural changes in the neural pathways associated with speech and language, specifically those processes related to semantic processing and retrieval in the hippocampus and temporal areas.

Working memory plays a large role in speech and language processing, including comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, and speech production (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993). Pallesen et. al tested working memory in musicians and nonmusicians between the ages 21-34 through a 1-back (1B) and 2-back (2B) task involving chords, and a condition of passive listening while under fMRI. An n-back task is a working memory task in which participants indicate when a given stimulus is a repeat of a stimulus n steps earlier. Results indicated that musicians responded significantly faster in both the 1B and 2B conditions and made significantly less errors in the 1B condition. Musicians also displayed significantly greater BOLD responses in the lateral prefrontal cortex, lateral parietal cortex, insula, and putamen in the right hemisphere, and the posterior dorsal prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate gyrus in both hemispheres, regions associated with sustaining attention (Pallesen et al., 2010). These results showed that musicians were better at holding audio stimuli in their working memory and quicker at identifying a sound that they had heard before. Since phonetics play a large role in language acquisition, musicians may have an easier time learning the phonetics of a new language and engaging in bilingual conversation.

In another study, musicians showed enhanced BOLD responses in the left anterior hippocampus in response to temporal mismatches after completing music-training at an academy as compared to pre-training (Herdener et al., 2010). Herdener et al. conducted a cross-sectional study on musicians and nonmusicians, and a longitudinal study on 19 musical students entering music academy and 21 control students. Each experiment employed a temporal mismatch paradigm of sine tones while participants were under fMRI. The cross-sectional experiment yielded greater BOLD responses to novel temporal structure in the left anterior hippocampus of musicians. Musical students showed greater BOLD responses in the hippocampus after training at the academic level (Herdener et al., 2010). The ability to detect acoustic changes and temporal novelty may play a role in a functional working memory, and evidenced to be increased in musicians. This ability pertains to language in that we need to discriminate between ambiguous phonetics of foreign speech, and the better we are at identifying the sound signature of one’s words, the better we are at identifying the content of their speech.

Effects of Music on Language Acquisition

Adults

It is important to delineate the effects of music on the cognitive abilities of both children and adults to explore the extent that music supplementation affects language acquisition in respect to age. It may yield insight into questions such as (i) does music-training as a child create functional changes that carry on as an adult, (ii) does music-training as an adult have any effect on language acquisition, and (iii) if age does affect the efficacy of music-training, to what extent?

To determine what effect musical experience as a child has on the adult brain, Cheung et al. gathered thirty young adults (mean age 21) with formal music training and thirty adults (mean age 20.93) with no formal music training, and gave them a verbal recall and visual recall memory test (2017). Musicians recalled significantly more words than non-musicians across three learning trials, but showed no significant difference in visual memory scores, suggesting a long-term effect of music on verbal but not visual learning (Cheung et al., 2017).

Additionally, EEG recordings displayed significantly higher long-range intrahemispheric theta coherence in musicians than non-musicians during the verbal memory encoding phase, and significantly greater coherence in the left hemisphere than the right, suggesting a link between brain activity and verbal recall (Cheung et al., 2017). “Coherence” is a measure of how well connected, or coherent, neurons are within a circuit. High coherence means there is a strong connection and communication between neurons of a circuit or region. Musicians displaying higher coherence than non-musicians suggests that their music training strengthened the circuits that are also involved in verbal recall. It is also likely that the greater coherence in the left hemisphere of musicians is related to the improved semantic recall associated with left-hemisphere abilities. (see here for more on coherence!)

Consistent music-training throughout childhood has also been shown to modify subcortical processes in the brainstem through adulthood (Musacchia, Sams, Skoe, & Kraus, 2007). Sixteen musicians who started an instrument before the age of five were paired against thirteen non-musicians in an audiovisual target task.

There were two audio stimuli, including the speech syllable “da” and the sound of a cello, and two visual stimuli including a video of a man pronouncing the syllable “da” and a video of a cello being bowed. Two paired tokens (audio and visual tokens) would be played together to create an audiovisual (AV) stimulus. Participants were told to silently count the number of target stimuli (one of the six stimuli) they saw or heard and to report the number at the end of each block (12 blocks, 600 tokens per block). Musicians performed better than non-musicians when the target stimuli was an audio or audiovisual target, but not visual target, suggesting an increased ability in musicians at auditory but not visual stimuli. EEG results showed that musicians displayed significantly earlier brainstem responses and larger amplitudes to the fundamental frequency of speech onset in audio and audiovisual conditions than non-musicians, suggesting enhanced pitch encoding (Musacchia, Sams, Skoe, & Kraus, 2007). The study demonstrates a clear enhancement of pitch perception in musicians, likely a result of music-training during adolescence that carried through to adulthood.

Children

Brain Activity. Like the musicians with greater brainwave amplitudes found by Musacchia et al., musically-trained children displayed an increase in multiscale entropy (MSE, a measure of brain signal complexity measured by EEG) during vowel and note tasks that was not seen in a French-learning group (Carpentier, Moreno, & McIntosh, 2016). Eighteen children between four and six years old received music-training and eighteen children received French language training for four weeks. MSE tests were performed before and after training while children passively listened to French vowels and musical notes. Results showed an increase in MSE in musically-trained children from pre-test to post-test, which was not present after French training. Additionally, the increase was mainly seen in the primary auditory cortex and superior temporal cortex (Carpentier, Moreno, & McIntosh, 2016).

Word Learning. Music-training has been shown to not only improve brain activity in children, but to also increase word learning (Dittinger, Chobert, Ziegler, & Besson, 2017). Sixteen children enrolled in extracurricular music training (mean age = 11) and sixteen children involved in a non-music extracurricular activity (mean age = 10) were assessed on learning six monosyllabic Thai words. Participants were told to respond as quickly as possible whether an auditory word spoken through headphones matched the visual stimuli on a screen after learning the meanings of the words in two learning phases. Children in the musically-trained group displayed significantly fewer errors and larger N200 (event-related potential 200ms post-stimulus) amplitudes for mismatch words than match words during the learning phase than the non-music group (Dittinger, Chobert, Ziegler, & Besson, 2017), suggesting enhanced encoding of novel words during the learning phase in musically-trained children than control children.

Speech Segmentation. To assess the effect of music-training on pseudo-word learning and speech segmentation in children with no prior experience, François et al. trained thirty-seven eight-year-old children in either music or painting for two years. Children were tested before training (T0), one year after training (T1), and two years after training (T2) on their ability to choose which of two artificial tri-syllabic pseudo-words sounded more familiar after listening to a continuous stream of sounds (2013). The groups did not differ in scores before training, but the music group performed significantly better than the painting group at T1 and T2, suggesting an improvement of speech segmentation following music-training in children (François, Chobert, Besson, & Schön, 2013). Enhanced encoding of novel words and improved ability of speech segmentation directly contributes to an improvement in language acquisition, which may even apply to foreign language.

Speech-in-Noise Perception in Bilinguals. The ability to discriminate speech against background noise is integral to communication, more so in bilinguals who must keep track of different intonations and pronunciations. Slater et al. collected data on forty-six children bilingual in English and Spanish over three years by testing the effects of music-training on speech-in-noise perception (2015). Participants had received no prior music training; training was provided by the Harmony Project, a non-profit organization aimed at supplying free music education to gang reduction zones in Los Angeles. Group 2 began music training immediately (one hour of training twice a week), while music training for Group 1 was delayed one year (serving as a control group). Tests were administered before training, one year after training, and two years after training (one year of training for Group 1), in which participants were instructed to repeat short sentences from headphones that were matched with speech-shaped background noise. Group 2 displayed significant improvement after two years of musical training, capable of detecting, on average, speech-in-noise 2.1 decibels lower from the first test. Group 2 also significantly outperformed Group 1 at the third test, showing a main effect of group. Group 1, like Group 2, did not show significant improvement after only one year, suggesting a minimum requirement of at least two years of music-training before seeing significant improvements in speech-in-noise perception in children (Slater et al., 2015).

The results suggest that accurate acoustic perception learned through music training may transfer to acoustic perception in speech, facilitating an increased language acquisition in musically-trained children compared to controls. What is more remarkable about this study is the ability of a non-profit organization to increase the speech-in-noise perception in kids living in areas at high risk for violence. The methods of this study prove the ability of music to increase speech-in-noise perception in children regardless of pre-existing factors such as living conditions or prior music experience.

Conclusion

Music-training has been shown to not only improve language acquisition in children, but appears to stick with musicians into adulthood. Whether the training comes from prior experience or is a new experience to individuals, it is shown time and again to enhance various aspects of language acquisition while reflecting greater responses from the neural mechanisms involved. It is not credible to argue that musical students only reflect greater language abilities due to better education arising from pre-existing conditions such as socioeconomic status, since a non-profit organization improved an integral aspect of language acquisition in children from a low socioeconomic background (Slater et al., 2015).

This review has explored the neural mechanisms related to language acquisition and processing, how they are enhanced in musicians, and how it may be related to studies displaying greater verbal memory, speech segmentation, and speech-in-noise perception in children. Music training may serve as a supplementary activity for children in K-12 grades to combat falling language abilities across the nation, regardless of socioeconomic status or previous experience with music. Future studies may aim at the optimal music program for language acquisition, displaying what aspects of music yield the greatest benefits to students.

If you want to learn a new language, consider learning an instrument! If you want your kid(s) to be as linguistically competent as they can be, think about training them on an instrument, or support music-training curriculum at their schools. It’s never too late to start, and can only serve to benefit you. If you want to learn more about how you can leverage your brain to benefit you, consider subscribing and becoming a braniac.

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