Hi everyone,
I hope you’ve had a great week! I myself have been busy observing language classrooms and reading through some research on the music-language connections. Needless to say, it’s been an inspirational and fruitful week!
Today I’m going to share a little about what I’ve learned from a frequently cited article by R. Milovanov and M. Tervaniemi called “The interplay between musical and linguistic aptitudes: A review” (2011). In this article, the authors share their findings as well as those from other leading experts in the field. As you may have guessed from the title of this blog entry, it all has to do with music, language, and the brain!
First of all, did you know that musical training can create new neural connections, the reorganization of existing connections, and actual structural changes in the brain?! More specifically, when comparing adult musicians to adult non-musicians, the anterior part of the corpus callosum is larger in musicians and several neural projections seem to have increased myelinization. Don’t worry, I also had no idea what either of those things meant, so I looked them up! According tocnsvp.standford.edu and medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com, the corpus callosum allows the two sides of the brain to exchange motor, sensory, and cognitive information, and myelinization is the process of coating the neuron’s axon to both protect it and make the transmission of information to other neurons, muscles, and glands more efficient. So why does that matter? Well, it basically means that if you receive musical training, and even more so if you receive musical training before puberty, parts of your brain may function more efficiently and effectively and you may be able to more easily adapt to different linguistic environments.
According to R. Milovanov and M. Tervaniemi (2011), these aforementioned benefits of musical training allow for musician children to better detect inconsistencies in both language and music, perceive pitch variation with greater ease, facilitate the reading of irregular words, and to more accurately distinguish between and pronounce the sounds of a foreign language. In other words, it is thought that due to their musical training, musician children’s brains are conditioned to both pay more attention to and better reproduce these musical aspects of language.
Although different parts of the brain seem to facilitate the learning of language and music, there is some overlap between the two networks. Similarly, many of the methods we use to teach language to children are embedded within songs and rhymes. As practising music involves focus and repetition, these overlapping neural networks become conditioned to operate more meticulously than what is required for regular communication and thus, musician children seem to be better prepared to take on the challenges of learning a second language.
To conclude, it is obvious that music and language are intertwined in many ways. I am excited to continue to learn more about these connections and how they may be exploited to maximize language learning in real-life classrooms. Until next time music and language lovers!
Milovanov, R., & Tervaniemi, M. (2011). The interplay between musical and linguistic aptitudes: A review. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 321.
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