学乐器能提升孩子的语言能力
Giving children music lessons won't just introduce them to a world of rhythm and melody - it could also significantly improve their language skills.
让孩子上音乐课不仅会将他们引入旋律的世界，而且还会显著提升他们的语言技能。
While numerous studies have shown that learning an instrument can impact things like language ability, it wasn't understood if this was a side effect of a general boost to cognitive skills, or something that directly affected language processing.
Now, we are getting closer to an answer, thanks to a study of 74 Chinese kindergarten children, led by neuroscientist Robert Desimone from MIT.
"The children didn't differ in the more broad cognitive measures, but they did show some improvements in word discrimination, particularly for consonants," explains Desimone.
"The piano group showed the best improvement there."
For the study, Desimone's team - including MIT scientists and researchers from Beijing Normal University - recruited children from the Chinese education system, with the support of education officials who wanted to see how music learning might boost their academic results.
The 4- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children in the study were randomly divided into three groups. One group received a 45-minute piano lesson three times a week, while another received extra reading instruction classes. The third group acted as controls, taking no extra lessons beyond their usual routine.
The classes lasted for six months, after which the children were tested on their ability to discriminate words based on differences in tone, consonants, or vowels.
The test results showed that the children who had taken piano lessons performed significantly better at discriminating between words that differ by a single consonant, when compared against the children who took extra reading lessons.
Compared to the control group, both the music learners and the extra reading group did better in terms of discriminating words based on vowel differences.