Are musicians better language learners?

[annathepiper]

I got into an interesting online discussion with Dara and our friend Rod, pertaining to recent research indicating that early musical instruction in childhood contributes to one’s language skills, by improving one’s ability to recognize meaningful sounds and reject noise.

As I am both a language geek and a music geek, you can imagine that this subject is of interest to me! So I went googling and found this article from back in February of this year, which talks a bit about this. According to this article, people who have early musical instruction have a better shot at learning languages even in adulthood.

Now me, I don’t know how well I match up to this, but it’s very interesting to consider nonetheless. I started playing flute in fourth grade, which would have been the year I turned ten. By age 12, I was in middle school band and I pretty quickly took over the first chair of the flute section, holding onto it until my eighth grade year when I was trumped by the girl who could play oboe.

I didn’t get to take language classes until high school, though. By then I’d had six years of school band, and it’s a very interesting question as to whether that musical instruction helped me out learning German. I had interest in German regardless–but it’s worth noting that I chose German partly because a) my dad had been stationed in Germany when he was in the Marines, and b) Elvis had been in Germany. He even had a bridge in one of his songs in German, and that was a not inconsiderable part of why I chose to take German instead of, say, Spanish. Even then, my language interest had a musical connection.

The language interest stayed with me into my adulthood and has certainly formed a significant part of my computer experience, since I do a lot of testing of stuff localized into other languages. A big part of that is pattern recognition, especially if the thing I’m testing is in Japanese–I have to rely on visual pattern matching just because Japanese characters don’t parse as ‘letters’ to me. So it’s a different kind of pattern matching than, say, on our German or French sites, where I know enough of the words that I can actually understand a good bit of what I see.

But that’s also visual pattern recognition. Part of what Dara and Rod and I talked about had to do with how this plays against aural pattern recognition in music–and whether the ability to learn patterns aurally in music affects your ability to match patterns visually, and vice versa. Does ability to read sheet music help you when you’re trying to learn to read a new language? Does ability to pick up on the structure of a song, or on a smaller scale certain repeated patterns of notes, help you identify recognizable patterns in spoken language? Do they all play well together in your brain?

I’m no researcher. But I can say this. It does all feel connected to me–I’ve absolutely noticed it all seeming to tie together as I’ve been studying French the last couple of years, as I’ve posted about before. Listening to a lot of Quebec trad improves my ability to aurally pattern-match words, and at the same time it’s got the song structure of the genre working in there too. Not only is Quebec trad heavily call-and-response driven, there are also distinct structures to songs, like the ones where you sing the last line of a verse and have that same line roll over to become the first line of the next verse.

And I’ve absolutely noticed that words or phrases I learn as part of a song have a much better chance at staying with me, too. They’re the ones most likely to pop out at me when I’m slowly stepping my way through reading something in French, or when I’m listening to a brand new song as well. Or if I’m reading the lyrics to a song, too.

Plus, I’ve been trying to use pattern recognition to learn to pick up tunes by ear in a session environment, too. It feels like a very similar skill to matching words–because there’s a definite grammar of how note patterns work in trad tunes, and I find myself slowly trying to learn that grammar and match it up with what I need to do on my flutes to make the correct noises. It feels exactly like trying to pick words that make sense out of spoken or sung French.

And I love the lot of it! Anybody else out there have similar experience?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[hederahelix]

This topic, or one close to it, has been on my mind lately because I'm teaching a lot of poetry right now. And for me, poetry has long been as accessible as prose. I've wondered, honestly, how much my musical background (I played violin briefly in elementary school before they said I was missing too much class time with that and gifted; then I sang in a youth choir through the rest of elementary and middle school; I joined band in middle school and played all the way through high school. I don't play now, but I dabbled with both choir and an instrument in college just for fun.) has affected the way I relate to poetry. To me, the idea that the sound and cadence of language is just as important, if not more, than how it looks on the page is spectacularly obvious. While there are aspects of poetry that are hard for me, there are others that feel deeply intuitive. I wonder, though, if what feels intuitive is just something that's drawing on skill sets from music that I may not be consciously aware of. I've more than once thought about the meter of poetry as being like the beat of a song. I can't read a poem off its meter any more than I could walk on the up beats to a song instead of the downbeats.

I know that that's not strictly a foreign language thing, but I suspect a lot of people see poetry as just as hard to make sense of as an unfamiliar language, so I thought I'd toss it out there.

[annathepiper]

I'd bet poetry works into this, absolutely--because of the meter question, and also because of how poetry IS only a skip over from the lyrics of songs.

And to tie this into foreign language study, certainly seeing how the translators handle the songs in The Hobbit have been some of the most intriguing bits of reading those editions for me! Particularly seeing how the translator for the German edition changed the songs to make them actually scan in German.

[vatine]

I simply do not have enough to make a comparison case. I had compulsory recorder playing in second and third year of school (so age 8-9), sang in the school choir years 2-5 (then my voice broke, then the choirmaster left the school, so there was a, like, 3-year gap without choir and then I never picked it up again). I also played saxophone years 4-6 (then quit, because reasons).

We also started taking English as a second language in third year (so, age 9, I guess) and tha tnever stopped. Which means everyone I have as reasonable comparison examples started with music lessons early and started with (and was forced to keep up with) a second (and sometimes a third and fourth) language, plus having ample subtitled audiovisual media for making sure the English was listened to.

[annathepiper]

Recorder was compulsory for you? Interesting! We didn't get any musical instruction when I was in elementary school until fourth grade, and even then, it was an elective as I recall.

It sounds like you had way, way more language instruction than we usually get here in America, too. I'm pretty sure most public school kids have to take at least one language, but it's often French or Spanish. More in-depth language study is usually optional.

[feuervogel]

I wouldn't consider myself a musician (I took voice lessons in high school and was in church and then college choirs forever, and my musical instrument (a requirement) in middle school was violin; I also played around on the piano), and I am really good at language learning.

It is definitely easier to remember things in song or poem/singsong/rhythmic forms. I don't know if that's a universal thing or jus very common, though.

[annathepiper]

Well, I'm cheerfully using "musician" here in as much an amateur sense as I am "does music for a living"--I am, after all, only an amateur myself. ;) But I did have several years of music in school, and I've played around a lot with it in my adulthood. I think for these purposes, that absolutely counts.

And from what you're saying about your own background, I'd say that counts too! Though I guess in your case the question might be whether you pursue any musical interests now?

And the interesting question here, I think, is how early you have to get that musical instruction in order to have it benefit your ability to process languages. From what I saw in that article I linked to, the idea seemed to be 'you need to get musical instruction really early'. I didn't get mine started until age 10.

I did have early exposure to music--which is what, I think, fueled my interest in actually starting to play it at my earliest opportunity--but I'm not sure that counts sufficiently!