Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 23, Issue 9, Pages 2038-2043Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhs180
Keywords
brain plasticity; language; longitudinal study; musical training; N400; statistical learning
Categories
Funding
- [ANR-Neuro-07-02401]
- [ANR-09-BLAN-0310]
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The role of music training in fostering brain plasticity and developing high cognitive skills, notably linguistic abilities, is of great interest from both a scientific and a societal perspective. Here, we report results of a longitudinal study over 2 years using both behavioral and electrophysiological measures and a test-training-retest procedure to examine the influence of music training on speech segmentation in 8-year-old children. Children were pseudo-randomly assigned to either music or painting training and were tested on their ability to extract meaningless words from a continuous flow of nonsense syllables. While no between-group differences were found before training, both behavioral and electrophysiological measures showed improved speech segmentation skills across testing sessions for the music group only. These results show that music training directly causes facilitation in speech segmentation, thereby pointing to the importance of music for speech perception and more generally for childrens language development. Finally these results have strong implications for promoting the development of music-based remediation strategies for children with language-based learning impairments.
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