Music-ability
March 20, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
I have long thought that the pitch and tones of speech—its musical qualities—are as important for my son Charlie in understanding speech as the sound of the words. Charlie and I have conversations that sound (that are) exchanges of warbling and bits of tunes; for the past few weeks, I have been teaching him to count in Mandarin (it is going slowly, but he always says each word perfectly on pitch: yi, er, san, syh……..).
A recent study in the online versions of Nature Neuroscience suggests that people with musical training have an easier time learning Chinese, precisely because, as the March 20th New York Times reports:
Mandarin speakers have been shown to have a more complex encoding of pitch patterns in their brains than English speakers do. This is presumably because in Mandarin and other Asian languages, pitch plays a central role. A single-syllable word can have several meanings depending on how it is intoned.
For this study, the researchers looked at 20 non-Chinese speaking volunteers, half with no musical background and half who had studied an instrument for at least six years.
As they were shown a movie, the volunteers also heard an audiotape of the Mandarin word “mi” in three of its meanings: squint, bewilder and rice. The researchers recorded activity in their brain stems to see how well they were processing the sounds.
Patrick C. M. Wong of Northwestern University, the lead author of the study, also noted that those who are native speakers of Mandarin and of tonal languages may learn musical instruments more easily.
Charlie’s native language is English, though language does not seem to be his most preferred mode of communication. He has taken quite readily to playing the piano and is now learning that the treble clef means you play with your right hand and the bass clef with your left. I have been thinking that his “music-ability” (I suppose there is a more formal term for this, but I am liking that neologism right now) has helped him to learn to read music: When he plays a note, he hears a sound, so that the note is not just some black lines on a piece of paper: It is sound, with tone, pitch; it is part of a melody.
…..wu, liow, chi, bah, jeou, shyr……..
I love the idea of language that engages the musical part of our brains
One thing that is becoming pretty clear to me is that Brendan’s receptive japanese is better than his expressive, in that he’s obviously getting what is said to him, even though he struggles a bit to make sentences with what he’s learned. What he does love, though, is learning words & concepts in japanese that he can use to name his legos & their “moves”, such as “dragon-wind-sword”. He’s had me label some of his lego guys (in hiragana) with the japanese names that he’s given them, each name carefully chosen by him to suit their characters. So much fun…
I am envious of Charlie’s musical abilities! I studied the violin for years, but the piano is a mystery to me. Not only do you play one thing with the right hand and another with the left, but in a different clef? Too much for my brain to handle!
I so admire Brendan’s learning Japanese — I’d like to learn it too, someday…how did he do with the notion of using a totally diferent system of writing?
We have not yet gotten to where Charlie plays with both hands—-that would be a fine feat of coordination! I played the viola, which meant I had to learn a third (the alto) clef. Very confusing and requiring some brain re-training on my own part.
Brendan & I both love codes, so learning the phonetic alphabets has been like learning a code- which most people we know don’t understand, hence the secret part.
He’s fluent enough in the hiragana to read his lessons, so we’ve moved on to the katakana alphabet. They are essentially the same sounds, but different symbols. Pokemon names are written in katakana, so we’re using his japanese cards & calendar pages as practise, with the added bonus that many of them are similar to their english names or the animals that they resemble, so it’s like the “surprise inside” the cereal box when he sounds them out.