Abstract
Musical aptitude and language talent are highly intertwined when it comes to phonetic language ability. Research on pre-school children’s musical abilities and foreign language abilities are rare but give further insights into the relationship between language and musical aptitude. We tested pre-school children’s abilities to imitate unknown languages, to remember strings of digits, to sing, to discriminate musical statements and their intrinsic (spontaneous) singing behavior (“singing-lovers versus singing nerds”). The findings revealed that having an ear for music is linked to phonetic language abilities. The results of this investigation show that a working memory capacity and phonetic aptitude are linked to high musical perception and production ability already at around the age of 5. This suggests that music and (foreign) language learning capacity may be linked from childhood on. Furthermore, the findings put emphasis on the possibility that early developed abilities may be responsible for individual differences in both linguistic and musical performances.
Highlights
Musical abilities and the link to language functions have gained considerable scientific interest in the past decade
Musical ear, singing ability/behavior and working memory capacity are linked to speech imitation abilities already at a very early stage in development
Comparable to research on adults, we have found similar effects and links in pre-school children, who are naïve in terms of education and music training, suggesting that individual differences might be based on very early developed factors
Summary
Musical abilities and the link to language functions have gained considerable scientific interest in the past decade. Music and language are highly intertwined, but despite their similarity remarkably different in many respects. Song, and language are all to a large degree acoustic and sensory-motor phenomena, perceived and executed which might be one of the reasons why investigations have started to compare the three faculties intensively [1,2,3,4]. Interdisciplinary research comparing and trying to account for the differences and commonalities between music, song and language functions ranges from brain to behavioral and evolutionary to ethological research [2,11,12,13,14]. Comparing musical abilities with language functions often focuses on testing foreign language learning rather than on first language acquisition [15,16,17]
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