Can singing increase the ability of speech?
Tags: Language Development, Language, Singing, Language Learning, Music

When referring to music as a whole, people often think that it is not really related to language as the orchestral elements play a big part. The two seem to not be directly related , however, if you paid attention to our last article, you would know that music plays a big role in early language development. But in particular, singing, which involves the most linguistic feature in the music world, has the most influence on promoting children’s early language development.

Credit: Unsplash

The relationship between music and speech could be closer than what you think. Within many cultures, there are gray areas between music and speech. The Ewe tribe in West Africa use talking drums to communicate between villages while “speakers” of Silbo Gomero use whistles to converse. In Cambodia, secular singing is typically accompanied by a fixed metrical pulse. Buddhist practice argues against music for spiritual practice, so the religious chants, which are highly melodic, are nevertheless treated as speech, to be performed without a rhythmic accompaniment. Poetry, with its attention to such sonic features such as rhyming, assonance, alliteration, and metric design, is widely regarded as hovering between music and speech. Indeed, epic poems are often sung: the Finnish Kalevala is frequently performed as a “singing match” between two voices. As adults, we process “canonical” speech and music differently: for example, speech and music show opposite patterns of hemispheric dominance, with speech processing relying more on the left hemisphere and music relying more on the right. Nevertheless, the neural regions underlying speech and music perception show significant overlap even in adults, with both types of stimuli recruiting a bilateral frontal-temporal network. Furthermore, some differences between regions responsive to speech and song in adults is to be expected: over development, our brains become far more specialized in many domains.

Credit: Unsplash

Although there are many similarities between music and language, there is little work comparing neural responses to speech and music in infants. Evidence shows that newborns largely overlap activation to infant directed speech and to instrumental music suggesting that processing differences in adult brains may have emerged gradually over the course of development. It has been suggested that speech and music may have intrinsic differences in low-level auditory characteristics that require different types of aural processing: for instance, some have proposed that speech includes very rapidly changing temporal features whereas music is made up primarily of pitch features varying over a longer time window. Yet, just as mentioned in the last article, the same perception of temporal acuity is required to process both speech and musical timbre. Therefore, it enhances the child’s ability to extract segmental and phonemic information from the speech signal.

In addition, infants often direct speech and singing together to serve as an aid for language learning by capturing and engaging attention and communicating affective information and later by enhancing the important patterns in language. Some have argued that the role of infant directed speech is not for learning per se, but rather serves as a vehicle for emotional communication. Despite the research in this aspect is not significant yet and infant directed speech might serve all of these purposes, it is known that its role in language acquisition changes over the course of development. First, speaking musically plays an attentional and affective role, and later directing attention to linguistically relevant information. Whatever its purpose, it is clear that a child’s first direct exposure to verbal communication frequently has heightened prosody, with the music, and meaning of speech all bound up together. This explains why parents tend to sing their children to sleep, other than enhancing the sleeping quality, there are deeper reasons behind.

Credit: Brandt, Anthony et al. “Music and early language acquisition.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 3 327. 11 Sep. 2012, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00327