words and music

Want your children to remember their vocabulary lists? Perhaps you should make them take music lessons. Music training improves verbal memory in children, according to a study published in the July issue of Neuropsychology. Agnes S. Chan, a psychologist at the University of Hong Kong, and her colleagues studied 90 boys between the ages of 6 and 15. Half belonged to their school’s orchestra and had studied music for one to five years; the other half had no musical training at all. The children were given verbal memory tests, to see how many words they could recall from a list, as well as visual memory tests, in which they had to recall images. Though no differences were found among the two groups in recalling images, students with musical training recalled significantly more words than the control group, and retained more words after a 30-minute delay. The researchers think that musical training stimulates the left side of the brain, aiding other left-brain functions, such as verbal learning. Further study also revealed that verbal memory improved with longer musical study. But music-school dropouts shouldn’t feel too bad. Though the researchers didn’t find any further improvement, the dropouts didn’t lose the advantage they had previously acquired.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 8/05/2003.