MAKE MUSIC AND THEN LEARN A LANGUAGE

There has been much research within the past 10 years that proves that learning to play music can increase one's ability to learn a language. The most recent research has involved brain imaging, and shows that when people play music, an area in the brain gets activated, and this area overlaps with the language area.

This is a big reason young children are taught language by singing to them. A researcher named Daniel Schon invented a number of gibberish words, and repeated them back to study participants. When these participants heard the words repeated one after another, it was very difficult to tell where one word started or ended. They had the participants in the study try to re-speak the words after 20 minutes of listening. The participants did no better than chance in recalling the words.

Then the researchers taught the gibberish words to the participants in a melodic way. After 7 minutes of listening, they had almost always a better then 50% recall rate. Below is the chart to show the progress of this study.

The dotted line in each graph represents the average score for all listeners, and each square is the average score for an individual listener. As you can see, the results of the melodic learning greatly improved language recall.

Again, we have more proof of the importance of music in every day life. To get more music in your every day life, take some lessons at Earthtone School of Music: http://www.earthtonemusic.org/

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