Music tunes the child's brain for speech. Free Technical Library News

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Music tunes the child's brain for speech

28.04.2016

You cannot confuse ordinary speech with music, they are still quite different, but they have something in common, and this is common - rhythmic organization. Musical rhythm is quite an obvious thing, but speech sounds are not at all chaotic, they are distributed over syllables and words, and when we hear someone say something, we clearly feel the boundaries between syllables, words, parts of a sentence, which allows us to understand what we hear.

In addition, according to some sources, the language in general is very deeply connected with music and even largely determines the structure of not only folk melodies and rhythms, but even author's musical works.

But if there is so much in common between music and speech, can we improve speech understanding with the help of music? Psychologists from the University of Washington think we can - experiments have shown that musical exercises help tune the brain to language. The experiment itself looked like this: for thirty days, parents with nine-month-old babies regularly came to the laboratory to play with their children for 12-15 minutes under the supervision of researchers. In one group they played with ordinary toys - with cars, dolls, cubes, and in the other they played musical games in which it was necessary to follow the rhythm (moreover, the music was in the rhythm of a waltz, which was not easy for young children to follow).

A week after the games were over, the parents and their children returned to the lab, this time using magnetoencephalography to determine the activity of different parts of the brain in infants. Sitting in the scanning device, the children listened to musical or speech fragments, and the rhythm of both speech and music was broken from time to time.

In the PNAS article, the authors write that those who played music games had a stronger brain response to rhythm disturbances - this was seen in the activity of the auditory cortex and in the activity of the prefrontal cortex, which, among other things, controls attention and the ability to sense structure in that we perceive.

If the brain feels interruptions in the rhythm, it means that in principle it heard it, learned it - otherwise it would not feel any changes. Of course, after musical games, one could expect that children would begin to perceive music better, but, as we see, the matter was not limited to music, as a "side effect" the brain began to respond more actively to the speech structure.

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