Music and Cognitive Achievement in Children

Music is widely believed to have many benefits for children beyond those within the realm of music itself. These benefits are thought to contribute importantly to development by improving intellectual, motor, and social abilities and skills. This article reviews part of this topic, specifically the relationship between music education and cognitive achievement. A scan of the research literature suggests the variable pursuit of this problem over the years, rather than a systematically enlarging body of research. With this in mind, let us consider studies that pertain to the single reason for music education that has exhibited continual and substantial increased emphasis in the modern period i.e., the view that music promotes cognitive development and abstract thought (see Matters of Opinion). Within this realm, we include topics such as reading, the mental rotation of representations of objects, and creative thinking. These tap into three of the many aspects of intelligence. We begin with an older study on music and reading, published by Hurwitz, Wolff, Bortnick and Kokas in 1975 (1). The authors asked whether music training improved reading performance in first grade children. The experimental group received Kodaly training, which uses folk songs and emphasizes melodic and rhythmic elements. The control group consisted of children who were matched in age, IQ and socioeconomic status at the beginning of the study and who received no special treatment. The music instruction was extensive, five days a week for 40 minutes per day, for seven months. Students were tested on reading ability at the start of the school year and then tested again at the end of the year. After training the music group exhibited significantly higher reading scores than did the control group, scoring in the 88th percentile vs. the 72nd percentile. Incidentally, the benefits for the music group were not due to better teaching of reading because students who had the same teacher before, during and after music training showed greatly improved reading performance. Moreover, continued music training was beneficial; after an additional year of Kodaly training, the experimental group was still superior to the control group. These findings clearly support the view that music education facilitates the ability to read. Although these results are impressive, both in terms of the use of control subjects and because the findings can be interpreted as a cause-effect relationship between music and reading, two questions immediately come to mind. First, was the enhancement of reading ability caused by music itself or simply by having a more varied school program, which happened to consist of music education. After all, the control group was left alone; had they been given some other special non-musical experiences, would they have improved as much as the music group? Second, how could music training possibly improve reading; the music group did not learn to read music but rather to listen, and recognize musical ideas, etc. We will consider both of these questions; an answer to the second will prove relevant to the first. To understand how music education might benefit reading, we need a brief review of how children usually learn to read after they can understand a language. According to Frith (2) there are three stages: [1] visually recognizing words, [2] learning the correspondences between visual parts of words ("graphemes") and their spoken sounds ("phonemes"), and then [3] achieving visual recognition of words without going through the earlier stages. It is the critical second or "phonemic" stage that is of interest here. We are all familiar with children "sounding-out" syllables and words while they are learning to read (stage 2) which they discard when they reach stage 3. It seems that music facilitates reading by improving the second, phonemic stage.