Does music help us learn language?

Posted by Dave Munger on June 19, 2008

One of the first steps to learning a language is figuring out

where one word ends and the next one begins. Since fluent
speakers don’t generally pause between words, it can be a
daunting task. We’ve discussed one of the ways people do it in
this post — they focus in on consonant sounds. Other
researchers have found that we also focus on the statistical
properties of language.

Certain syllables are likely to follow each other within

individual words, but unlikely to follow each other between
words. Take the phrase “between words.” In English, within a
single word we’re much more likely to hear bet followed by
ween than ween followed by wor.

Researchers have found that if you make up nonsense words like

gimysi and mimosi and play a constant stream of these words to
listeners, the listeners will eventually figure out the boundaries
of the words based solely on the statistical properties of the
words.

But still, it can take a long time to pick up the word boundaries.
A team led by Daniele Schön invented just six words: gimysi,
mimosi, pogysi, pymiso, sipygy, and sysipi, and after seven
minutes of listening to these words repeated in random order,
student volunteers couldn’t distinguish between them. It took
over 20 minutes for listeners to learn where one word started
and the next one ended.

Schön’s team suspected that singing the words might improve

listeners’ ability to parse them. After all, mothers often sing to
their infants. Perhaps one purpose of singing is to help children
learn language faster. In a second experiment, the researchers
assigned a unique pitch to each of the syllables used in their six
words (gi was C5, my was D5, and sy was F5, and so on). A
speech synthesizer played back the words in a sing-song
fashion, with a musical note assigned to each syllable.

After listening to the words for seven minutes, the volunteers

were tested. They heard three-syllable “words” from the original
list and partial words composed of fragments of real words (for
example, mysimi, made from gimysi and mimosi). How accurate
were listeners at identifying the original words? Here are the
results:

The dotted line in each graph represents the average score for all
listeners, and each square is the average score for an individual
listener. As you can see, in the speech-only experiment, listeners
did no better than chance. But in the second experiment, nearly
everyone did better than chance, and the average score was 64
percent correct — significantly better than chance performance.
Simply associating each syllable with a musical note improved
performance.

But in real songs, syllables aren’t always matched with the same
notes. Sometimes different syllables get the same note, and
sometimes the same syllable is sung with a different note. In a
third experiment, Schön’s team allowed the notes to vary with
each syllable. Again, listeners could identify words at a rate
better than chance (though they weren’t as good as in the second
experiment).

Schön and her colleagues don’t go so far as to argue that music

is a requirement for learning language, but they do make the
case that the extra information provided in music can facilitate
language learning. They also suggest that other information, like
gestures, might be equally helpful for learning a language.

But there is additional evidence suggesting that music plays an

important role in language. Similar areas of the brain are
activated when listening to or playing music and speaking or
processing language. Language and music are both associated
with emotions. And of course, we know that children —
especially small children — really like music. This study offers
another bit of evidence that the link between language and
music may be a fundamental one.

D Schon, I Peretz, M Besson, M Boyer, R Kolinsky, S Moreno

(2008). Songs as an aid for language acquisition Cognition, 106
(2), 975-983 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.03.005