Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Musical Training 36
Besson, 2006; Schön et al., 2004). Moreno and Besson (2006) investigated in children
the influences of relative short-termed (8 weeks) musical training compared to painting
lessons on the processing of prosody. No behavioural differences were found. Electrophysiologically,
the late positive component in response to a strong prosodic incongruity
had a reduced amplitude in musically trained children.
Verbal memory: Musical training enhanced verbal memory performance (Kilgour,
Jakobson, & Cuddy, 2000), presumably due to the strengthened auditory temporal-order
processing in musicians. Two further studies (Chan, Ho, & Cheung, 1998 [adults]; Ho,
Cheung, & Chan, 2003 [children]) demonstrated improvements in verbal, but not in
visual (short-term) memory (with retention intervals of 10 to 30 min) whereas no significant
correlations of verbal memory scores with age, IQ, and socioeconomic factors
were found. Brandler and Rammsayer (2003) also found reliably higher performance in
verbal memory in conservatory students.
Reading: It seems reasonable to hypothesize that musical training may help children to
acquire reading skills, since both, music and language, involve formal written notation
which maps onto a specific sound (requiring phonological or tonal distinction). Butzlaff
(2000) ran a meta-analysis of six experimental and 25 correlation studies: A strong and
reliable association between music and reading was found in the correlation studies,
whereas heterogeneous and non-robust results were observed in the experimental studies.
It was, thus, summarized that the relationship of these two variables is neither large,
nor robust, nor reliable. In contrast, a recent study on early reading ability found music
skills correlated with both phonological awareness and reading development, further
showing that music perception skills were a good predictor of reading ability, even
when variance due to phonological awareness and other cognitive abilities (mathematics,
digit span, and vocabulary) were statistically controlled for (Anvari, Trainor, Woodside,
& Levy, 2002).
3.6 Conclusion
Neurophysiological as well as behavioural evidence indicates that musical training may
lead to improvements in certain cognitive functions. Such improvements are consistently
found especially for music perception and motor performance. They range from
very basic, perceptual processes (e.g., an enhanced neural activity when perceiving of
instrumental timbre) to more complex, cognitive functions (as the improved processing
of musical syntax). Because these differences are mainly found for neural processes that
related to music perception and performance, it seems highly likely that differences
between musicians and non-musicians are induced by learning and due to neuronal
plasticity. Moreover, children who start to learn an instrument were not found to differ