Musical training and language-related brain electrical activity in children

Abstract

This experiment aimed at testing whether 8 weeks of musical training affect the ability of 8-year-old children to detect pitch changes in language. Twenty nonmusician children listened to linguistic phrases that ended with prosodically congruous words or with weak or strong pitch incongruities. We recorded reaction times, error rates, and event-related brain potentials to the final words. Half of the children followed music training and the other half painting training, and all children were retested following training. For both groups, the weak incongruity was the most difficult to detect, but performance was not significantly different between groups. However, the amplitude of a late positive component was largest to strong incongruities and was reduced after training only in the music group. These results suggest that a relatively short exposure to pitch processing in music exerts some influence on pitch processing in language.