Music Education and Reading/Verbal Skills

• The combined results of 30 studies indicate that music instruction is linked to significantly improved reading skills.
  Standley, J. M.  (2008).  Does music instruction help children learn to read?  Evidence of a meta-analysis.  Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, 27(1), 17-32.

 

• Researchers have found a correlation between three or more years of instrumental music training and enhanced auditory discrimination, fine motor skills, vocabulary, and nonverbal reasoning.
  Forgeard, M., Winner, E., Norton, A., & Schlaug, G. (2008). Practicing a musical instrument in childhood is associated with enhanced verbal ability and nonverbal reasoning. PloS One, 3(10), e3566.

 

• Playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem’s sensitivity to speech sounds.  This relates to encoding skills involved with both music and language.
  Patrick C M Wong, Erika Skoe, Nicole M Russo, Tasha Dees, & Nina Kraus. (2007). Musical experience shapes human brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch patterns. Nature Neuroscience, 10(4), 420-422.

 

• Children with music training had significantly better verbal memory than those without such training, and the longer the training, the better the verbal memory.
  Ho, Y. C., Cheung, M. C., & Chan, A. Music training improves verbal but not visual memory: cross-sectional and longitudinal explorations in children (2003) Neuropsychology, 12, 439-450

 

• Adults who had trained on a Western musical instrument for at least six years before age 12 had significantly better verbal memories, as demonstrated by a word recall list, than those without any musical training.
  Chan, A.S., Ho, Y.C., & Cheung, M.C. (1998).  Music training improves verbal memory, Nature, 396, 128.

 

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