Listening to your little one play the scales over and over mightn’t be your idea of a fun Saturday morning, but it could make a lot of difference in the long run.
Learning to play the piano has been shown to boost a child’s linguistic skills in a new study.
The children who took piano lessons were found to have enhanced neural abilities which helped to boost their language development.
Researchers took 74 Mandarin-speaking four and five-year-olds and split them into three groups.
One group took 45-minute piano lessons every week, another group had 45 minutes of additional reading time each week and the others were part of a control group, getting neither music lessons nor extra reading time.
After six months, there was no difference between the groups’ IQ, memory or attention span.
The kids in the group that took piano lessons, however, were better at distinguishing between different words than the others.
Their ability to hear the difference between words was correlated with their ability to hear musical pitch changes, the researchers said.
“Piano training thus improves children’s common sound processing, facilitating certain aspects of language development as much as, if not more than, reading instruction,” they concluded.
“There’s evidence that early exposure to piano practice enhances the processing of sounds that extend not only from music, but also into language,” said co-lead author John Gabrieli of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
