Measuring musical abilities in childhood can be challenging. When music training and maturation occur simultaneously, it is difficult to separate the effects of specific experience from age-based changes in cognitive and motor abilities. The goal of this study was to develop age-equivalent scores for two measures of musical ability that could be reliably used with school-aged children (7–13) with and without musical training. The children's Rhythm Synchronization Task (c-RST) and the children's Melody Discrimination Task (c-MDT) were adapted from adult tasks developed and used in our laboratories. The c-RST is a motor task in which children listen and then try to synchronize their taps with the notes of a woodblock rhythm while it plays twice in a row. The c-MDT is a perceptual task in which the child listens to two melodies and decides if the second was the same or different. We administered these tasks to 213 children in music camps (musicians, n = 130) and science camps (non-musicians, n = 83). We also measured children's paced tapping, non-paced tapping, and phonemic discrimination as baseline motor and auditory abilities We estimated internal-consistency reliability for both tasks, and compared children's performance to results from studies with adults. As expected, musically trained children outperformed those without music lessons, scores decreased as difficulty increased, and older children performed the best. Using non-musicians as a reference group, we generated a set of age-based z-scores, and used them to predict task performance with additional years of training. Years of lessons significantly predicted performance on both tasks, over and above the effect of age. We also assessed the relation between musician's scores on music tasks, baseline tasks, auditory working memory, and non-verbal reasoning. Unexpectedly, musician children outperformed non-musicians in two of three baseline tasks. The c-RST and c-MDT fill an important need for researchers interested in evaluating the impact of musical training in longitudinal studies, those interested in comparing the efficacy of different training methods, and for those assessing the impact of training on non-musical cognitive abilities such as language processing.

Studies with adult musicians show that beginning lessons before age seven is associated with better performance on musical tasks and enhancement in auditory and motor brain regions. It is hypothesized that early training interacts with periods of heightened neural development to promote greater plasticity and better learning and performance later in life. However, we do not know whether such effects can be observed in childhood. Moreover, we do not know the degree to which such effects are related to training, or whether early training has different effects on particular musical skills depending on their cognitive, perceptual or motor requirements. To address these questions, we compared groups of child musicians who had started lessons earlier or later on age-normed tests of rhythm synchronization and melody discrimination. We also matched for age, years of experience, working memory and global cognitive ability. Results showed that children who started early performed better on simple melody discrimination and that scores on this task were predicted by both age of start (AoS) and cognitive ability. There was no effect of AoS for the more complex rhythm or transposed melody tasks, but these scores were significantly predicted by working memory ability, and for transposed melodies, by hours of weekly practice. These findings provide the first evidence that earlier AoS for music training in childhood results in enhancement of specific musical skills. Integrating these results with those for adult musicians, we hypothesize that early training has an immediate impact on simple melody discrimination skills that develop early, while more complex abilities, like synchronization and transposition require both further maturation and additional training.

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