By Day GreenbergThe Daily Northwestern

Corrections appended 06/06/07

Receiving musical training early in life enhances long-term language learning in adults and improves the mind’s ability to decipher sound, a new study published by Northwestern researchers found.

“Musical experience improves the brain’s ability to make sense out of the information it gets from your ear,” said neurobiology Prof. Nina Kraus, director of NU’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory and senior author of the study. The results from the year-long study will appear in the April issue of Nature Neuroscience.

The encoding of sound occurs in the brainstem, which was previously thought to be responsible solely for relaying information to the cortex.

“Our work shows that our basic sensory circuitry changes with experience – it’s more trainable, more malleable than previously thought,” Kraus said.

The researchers studied adults’ neural responses to syllables in Mandarin Chinese, a language that uses tones and pitch to determine word meaning.

The subjects heard a random mixture of three Mandarin sounds that differed in pitch. The sound “mi” was presented with a level tone, which means “to squint,” a rising tone, which means “bewilder,” and a dipping tone, which means “rice.”

The subject groups consisted of musicians and non-musicians, and researchers saw differences in the way the subjects subconsciously analyzed the sounds – musicians encoded the sound information better than non-musicians.

Musicians were more sensitive to the subtle changes in pitch patterns, even though the patterns occurred in a non-musical context like language, said Communication Sciences and Disorders Prof. Patrick Wong.

Wong’s research group, which focuses its work on the cerebral cortex, worked together with Kraus’s group, who looked at the brainstem.

This recent study is a part of a larger study, which has been going on for about a decade, called “Listening, Learning and the Brain.” Specialists in medicine, neurophysiology, speech perception and learning are studying how the brain processes speech in children with and without learning disabilities.

“Any type of activity where the kid is actually engaged in music we hypothesize will support neural development and will result in perhaps better language abilities,” said Nicole Russo, a sixth year graduate student in NU’s Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program.

“We hypothesize that the musical training would improve both their brainstem encoding of speech sounds in general and that they would have some behavioral benefits as well,” Russo said.

Speech shares similarities with music because both involve using pitch cues to understand meaning, said Erika Skoe, who works in the lab as a software developer and project coordinator.

Skoe said the researchers also have been doing studies to discover when the brainstem response matures in children. “That will kind of speak to when we need to be doing music training in kids and when they would get the most benefit,” Russo said. “The earlier you get the auditory influence of musical training, the better the outcome.”

Reach Day Greenberg at [email protected].