Those violin lessons might not lead your child to Juilliard, but they could boost his verbal SAT scores. According to a recent study, children with consistent music training have better verbal memories than those who don’t play an instrument, and the advantage seems to endure even after they quit their lessons.
Researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong studied 90 boys ages 6 to 15. Of the group, half had music training both from individual lessons and from participating in their school’s string orchestra. The other half had no musical training. When tested for verbal memory, the young musicians performed significantly better than their nonmusical peers.
In a follow-up memory test one year later, researchers found that students who had discontinued their music training still scored better on verbal tests than those who had never taken music lessons in the first place. But the musicians’ verbal skills appeared to level off after they discontinued the lessons. Researchers believe the relationship may be due to the involvement of the brain’s left temporal lobe in both verbal and musical tasks. The study was published in the journal Neuropsychology.
