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Study: Music Helps Kids' Verbal Memory
ABC News, July 29, 2003
For more articles like this visit http://www.bridges4kids.org. 

 
Remember those piano lessons you hated, or those dreaded hours practicing the violin? It turns out they might have gotten you better test scores.

According to a new study, children with music training had significantly better verbal memory than those without such training, and the longer the training, the better the verbal memory. The research, conducted at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was published in the most recent issue of the journal Neuropsychology.

Researchers studied 90 boys between the ages of 6 and 15. Half had musical training as members of their school's string orchestra program, plus lessons in playing classical music on Western instruments like the flute or violin for one to five years. The other 45 students had no training.

Students with musical training recalled more words in a verbal memory test than did untrained students, and after a 30-minute delay, students with training also retained more words than the control group. No differences were found for visual memory.

In a follow-up one year later, students who continued training and beginners who had just started learning to play both showed improvement in verbal learning and retention. But students who had stopped training three months after the first study failed to show any improvement, although they hadn't lost the verbal memory gains measured earlier.

"The present findings suggest that the experience of music training might improve the memory functioning that corresponds to neuroanatomical structures that might be modified by such training," said lead researcher Agnes Chan.

Debate Rages Over Music and Memory

So should you start taking your kids to music lessons? Not so fast.

While the study adds to a large volume of research being done on music and the brain, it has also caused an intense amount of debate.

The researchers believe when music stimulates a region of the brain called the left temporal lobe, a beneficial side effect is better performance at other functions, such as verbal memory. That might also explain why no difference was seen for students' visual memory, since that is mainly processed by the right temporal region.

Agreeing is Frances H. Rauscher, associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. "The study complements the growing number of reports showing differences between the brains of musicians and non-musicians … It provides strong evidence not only for a link between music and verbal memory, but also for the notion that specific types of experience affect specific cognitive domains."

Added Robert Zatorre, professor at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University: "The conclusion the authors are jumping to that music causes improved memory is something we have to be extremely careful about."

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