Musician children detect pitch violations in both music and language better than nonmusician children: behavioral and electrophysiological approaches.

I recently found a very interesting article involving children who are trained in music. The abstract of this blog revealed to me that the information this article provides will really assist with my research. I have not comppleted reading the entire article, but I skimmed a bit and read a few pieces of pertinant information that I found to be particularly interesting.

"The idea that extensive musical training can influence processing in cognitive domains other than music has received considerable attention from the educational system and the media. Here we analyzed behavioral data and recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from 8-year-old children to test the hypothesis that musical training facilitates pitch processing not only in music but also in language. We used a parametric manipulation of pitch so that the final notes or words of musical phrases or sentences were congruous, weakly incongruous, or strongly incongruous. Musician children outperformed nonmusician children in the detection of the weak incongruity in both music and language. Moreover, the greatest differences in the ERPs of musician and nonmusician children were also found for the weak incongruity: whereas for musician children, early negative components developed in music and late positive components in language, no such components were found for nonmusician children. Finally, comparison of these results with previous ones from adults suggests that some aspects of pitch processing are in effect earlier in music than in language. Thus, the present results reveal positive transfer effects between cognitive domains and shed light on the time course and neural basis of the development of prosodic and melodic processing." (Magne, Schön, Besson.)

Music training has really been proved to assist students with mathematic understanding. Pitch processing and math correllate with each other. This article, along with several others, states that, "Musician children outperformed nonmusician children in the detection of the weak incongruity in both music and language." I like the fact that this article speaks to positive performance in other areas of education and that students trained in music out-perform those who are not.

Link to article for later reading: http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/16494681