Why You Should Enroll Your Kids in Piano Lessons, According to Science

With 88 keys and hundreds of internal strings, a standard piano produces a slew of unique sounds and tones. And mastering that complex system doesn’t only result in beautiful music — a new study says it can also help kids build up their language skills. “There’s evidence that early exposure to piano practice enhances the processing of sounds that extend not only from music, but also into language,” says John Gabrieli, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the co-author of the paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Building on an existing body of research on music and childhood development, the authors pinpoint a specific way that piano lessons can help young children enhance their language processing skills. As kids’ ears become trained to distinguish between different pitches and tones at the piano, Gabrieli explains, they also seem to get better at parsing subtle differences between spoken words, a key element of language acquisition. For the study, researchers sorted 74 Mandarin-speaking Chinese kindergarteners, all of whom were either 4 or 5 years old, into three groups. One group took three 45-minute piano lessons each week, one group got the same amount of additional reading instruction, and the final group did neither. After six months, the groups showed no significant differences in general measures of cognitive abilit...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime Innovation Health onetime Research Source Type: news