Born to Speak and Sing: Musical Predictors of Language Development in Pre-schoolers

Abstract

The relationship between musical and linguistic skills has received particular attention in infants and school-aged children. However, very little is known about pre-schoolers. This leaves a gap in our understanding of the concurrent development of these skills during development. Moreover, attention has been focused on the effects of formal musical training, while neglecting the influence of informal musical activities at home. To address these gaps, in Study 1, 3- and 4-year-old children ( n = 40) performed novel musical tasks (perception and production) adapted for young children in order to examine the link between musical skills and the development of key language capacities, namely grammar and phonological awareness. In Study 2, we investigated the influence of informal musical experience at home on musical and linguistic skills of young pre-schoolers, using the same evaluation tools. We found systematic associations between distinct musical and linguistic skills. Rhythm perception and production were the best predictors of phonological awareness, while melody perception was the best predictor of grammar acquisition, a novel association not previously observed in developmental research. These associations could not be explained by variability in general cognitive functioning, such as verbal memory and non-verbal abilities. Thus, selective music-related auditory and motor skills are likely to underpin different aspects of language development and can be dissociated in pre-schoolers. We also found that informal musical experience at home contributes to the development of grammar. An effect of musical skills on both phonological awareness and language grammar is mediated by home musical experience. These findings pave the way for the development of dedicated musical activities for pre-schoolers to support specific areas of language development.

The German Music@Home: Validation of a questionnaire measuring at home musical exposure and interaction of young children

“…The results of the two years olds are interesting as they indicate that an enriched home musical environment can be associated with more rapid language development in young toddlers. A positive link between children's musical skills and/or formal musical training and language development has also been reported in previous studies [15,45,46] and an association between higher frequency of musical interactions and enriched musical exposure and development of complex language skills has been reported in a study with 3-and 4-year-old children [47]. However, it is important to note that the results presented here need to be interpreted with caution.…”

Six‐month‐old infants recognize phrases in song and speech

“…Consequently, future research should investigate to what extent caregiver singing and other types of rhythmic-melodic input such as rhyming story books (Richards & Goswami, 2019) contribute to infants' perception of phrasal boundaries in speech. Such a relationship between language play and real-life linguistic abilities would speak to recent studies suggesting a link between rhythmic-melodic processing of music and speech on the one hand and grammar development on the other (Gordon, Jacobs, Schuele, & McAuley, 2015;Leong & Goswami, 2015;Politimou et al, 2019). The current study contributes an empirical foundation for such future investigations, by showing that for young infants, the major phrasal units in ID song are at least as accessible as in ID speech.…”

“…Investigating infants' ability to recognize phrase structure in songs is also relevant in light of recent evidence that the recognition of phrasal structure in linguistic or musical play is related to grammar development in typically developing preschoolers (Politimou, Dalla Bella, Farrugia, & Franco, 2019) and children with developmental language disorder (Richards & Goswami, 2019). As prosodic parsing is a pre-cursor to syntactic development (Morgan & Demuth, 1996), these studies raise the possibility that caregivers' language play, including ID singing, contributes to the development of prosodic parsing.…”

“…As prosodic parsing is a pre-cursor to syntactic development (Morgan & Demuth, 1996), these studies raise the possibility that caregivers' language play, including ID singing, contributes to the development of prosodic parsing. However, the work suggesting a relationship between phrase perception and grammar development focused on (pre)school children (Politimou et al, 2019;Richards & Goswami, 2019), whereas prosodic parsing already develops within the first year of life (Carvalho, Dautriche, Millotte, & Christophe, 2018), and a direct test of children's ability to segment phrases from songs or other forms of language play is still poignantly lacking. The current study thus aims to provide evidence for infants' recognition of the phrasal building blocks of ID songs.…”

Rhythm in speech and animal vocalizations: a cross‐species perspective

“…Thus, coupling movement to the temporal dynamics of metrical speech can enhance verbal processing and memorization. This effect is reminiscent of more ecological situations in which hand clapping or stamping to metrical speech (e.g., children's lore) is part of games that may enhance children's social and verbal skills . Moreover, the aforementioned effects of synchronized movement may pave the way to innovative rhythm‐based interventions currently under investigation for fostering language acquisition and learning in developmental populations with speech and language disorders, such as dyslexic or autistic children …”