This has been shown to us by Sylvain Moreno and Yunjo Lee, from the University of York, in a study carried out with 36 children from 4 to 6 years of age who were given a brief training in music and also in a second language (notions of French) . These researchers conducted the experiment with children who were at a summer camp.
Half of the children were given music classes and the other half French classes during that time, one hour a day from Monday to Friday for 4 weeks. Both before training and immediately after, the children took a computer test while the electrical activity of their brains was collected with EEG.
In the proposed tasks, they were presented with two French phonemes (sounds) or two musical notes respectively, one of them frequent and the other less frequent. This same procedure was repeated a year later to see if the changes that might occur would be preserved over time.
The results, published in the journal Child Development (2015), showed how both types of brief training caused changes in the children’s brain function. To begin with, it was found that the children of the language group were able to discriminate more quickly the infrequent phonemes, as well as those of the music group did it with the musical notes, thus showing a better ability to process relevant information and suppress the irrelevant .
In addition, the training had a general positive effect, independent of its modality, since the children of both groups also showed changes when they performed the task for which they had not been trained. This would show that there is some kind of transfer between musical training and language training.
Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, when they were reassessed after a year, the researchers found that the brain changes found after training were still maintained, although somewhat attenuated. It seems that with a little training in childhood, music and languages can bring about long-lasting positive brain changes. And even if it catches us older, it is never too late if happiness is good. Learning is always good because it stimulates our brain.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
