What is the impact of musical training on brain development? This project will determine how the subcortical transcription of speech and cortical attention indices are affected by musical training during adolescence and how these neural processes drive language, learning and literacy abilities. Music's inherent activation of neural attention mechanisms provides a distinct advantage for engendering subcortical and cortical plasticity and learning. However, children from low-income families have little access to musical training. The researchers thus hypothesize that by undergoing musical training to boost processes of auditory attention, low-SES youths will demonstrate improved educational performance and underlying neural processes. Specifically, musical training may close the gap between students of low- and high-SES by strengthening neural underpinnings of language, learning and language development. Scientific partnerships with educational institutions can be difficult to form. Through a relationship with local high schools this project provides the opportunity to produce longitudinal findings as the investigators follow students throughout their four years of high school.
By defining the impact of musical experience in shaping language and literacy skills this work could provide objective biological evidence for the support of music education delivered in schools that serve low-SES populations. Educators and policy makers, in the face of tough fiscal decisions, may be encouraged to maintain and promote, rather than cut, musical education at the secondary school level, potentially decreasing the prevalence and economic stresses of language, learning and literacy impairment.
This project provided start-up funds to initiate a 5-year longitudinal study that addressed the impact of music training on the brain development of adolescents of low socioeconomic status. We were interested in how music training influences how the brain interacts with heard and read language (i.e., speech and reading). We were motivated by the fact that impairment in these areas inordinately affects youth of low socioeconomic status. Because we know that music training is associated with language processing enhancements in musician adults, we asked whether music training provides neural and behavioral benefits to a historically disadvantaged population. These funds enabled us to initiate the first two years of this project, during which we recruited and enrolled 190 entering high school freshmen from disadvantaged Chicago neighborhoods. Half of these subjects began music training following their first test session, whereas the other half began military training through their schools’ ROTC programs, without access to music training. Many subjects have already returned to our laboratory for data collection 1- and 2-years post-training. Data collection will continue for five years, after which we will determine how brain and language development differed across the music- and military-trained (ROTC) groups. Start-up funding provided by this award enabled us to initiate this work and secure long-term funding from the Mathers Foundation. These new funds will support the project through its completion, facilitating the collection of data in each subject before training as well as one, two, three, and four years after training. The first year’s data, however, have already yielded striking insights into adolescent brain development. Outcomes from this work, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, have revealed that learning a second language enhances speech processing and attention abilities. This work has had a wide-impact through its dissemination in reports from the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and others. These outcomes suggests that bilingualism may provide protective effects to brain development that ward against the disadvantages faced by many youth of low socioeconomic status.
