By Eveline Chao
The part of the brain responsible for producing and understanding speech is called Broca’s area. As it happens, this area is also responsible for processing music. Arguably, music is a language unto itself, and there is a lot of research suggesting that musical training also brings language-related benefits – musicians seem to learn second languages faster than non-musicians.
“That’s not to say that if you play the guitar, you can immediately pick up Mandarin Chinese,” says researcher Gavin Bidelman on ‘Lexicon Valley,’ a Slate.com podcast about language. “But people with extensive musical training do tend to pick up some of the sound elements and phonological elements of a language faster.”
Another verbal skill improved by music training is the ability to distinguish speech in loud environments, like a cafe. According to Bidelman, musician brains respond more “robustly” to speech and language, and also more precisely. “Musical training tunes the brain. Pun intended,” he notes.
So, we know that musical training can enhance language function. But what about the opposite – can some languages confer musical benefits?
Those that involve pitched, music-like tones – such as Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Thai – are obvious ones to look at. Bidelman is director of the Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, where they’ve run experiments involving three groups of people: English speakers with at least 10 years of classical music training; English speakers with little to no musical training; and native Cantonese speakers with little to no musical training.
In one, the groups heard a series of pitches and had to identify when the pitches were the same and when one was higher. The difference between the level pitches and the higher one grew smaller and smaller, testing how finely they could hear pitch variations.
Some exercises involved more complicated strings of melodies. In one of these, subjects heard two melodies that were either identical or differed by one out-of-tune note. They had to identify whether the melodies were the same or different.
Bidelman found that with the simpler tests, the Cantonese speakers and the musicians performed equally well; the non-musician English speakers less so. With the more complex tasks, like the melody one, the musicians did best, then the Cantonese speakers, then the non-musician English speakers; the advantage was weaker, but still there.
Good news indeed for the Tiger Moms of the world: it seems that tonal languages do, in fact, help with musical processing.
// Eveline Chao is a freelance writer and the author of NIUBI! – The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School, available on Amazon and in local English-language bookstores.
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