Born to Speak and Sing: Musical Predictors of Language Development in Pre-schoolers.

Nina Politimou,Nicolas Farrugia,Simone Dalla Bella,Fabia Franco

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00948

Abstract

The relationship between musical and linguistic skills has received particular attention in infants and school-aged children. However, very little is known about pre-schoolers. This leaves a gap in our understanding of the concurrent development of these skills during development. Moreover, attention has been focused on the effects of formal musical training, while neglecting the influence of informal musical activities at home. To address these gaps, in Study 1, 3- and 4-year-old children (n = 40) performed novel musical tasks (perception and production) adapted for young children in order to examine the link between musical skills and the development of key language capacities, namely grammar and phonological awareness. In Study 2, we investigated the influence of informal musical experience at home on musical and linguistic skills of young pre-schoolers, using the same evaluation tools. We found systematic associations between distinct musical and linguistic skills. Rhythm perception and production were the best predictors of phonological awareness, while melody perception was the best predictor of grammar acquisition, a novel association not previously observed in developmental research. These associations could not be explained by variability in general cognitive functioning, such as verbal memory and non-verbal abilities. Thus, selective music-related auditory and motor skills are likely to underpin different aspects of language development and can be dissociated in pre-schoolers. We also found that informal musical experience at home contributes to the development of grammar. An effect of musical skills on both phonological awareness and language grammar is mediated by home musical experience. These findings pave the way for the development of dedicated musical activities for pre-schoolers to support specific areas of language development.

Highlights

Music, like language, is a highly complex system
A number of significant relationships were observed between musical skills and subtests and composite scores of phonological awareness and grammar
Performance in temporal or rhythmic tasks was mostly linked with phonological awareness, whereas performance in the melody task was associated with grammar

Summary

Introduction

Like language, is a highly complex system. In language smaller units such as phonemes and morphemes are combined to form higher-order structures, namely words and sentences. The distinctive way adults speak when addressing infants, known as Infant Directed (ID) speech or “motherese” (Fernald, 1985; Fernald and Kuhl, 1987), is characterized by higher pitch and exaggerated rhythmic and melodic patterns (Fernald, 1985; Trehub et al, 1993). This richly intonated type of speech that efficiently conveys the prosodic features of one’s native language may shape infant vocal production in the first year of life. The capacity to process speech prosody and to perceive intonational contours in melody is an area where music and language overlap in the brain (Patel, 2010)

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