A language teacher of mine told me once that she had noticed that people who were musicians (this includes singing, playing an instrument, etc.) had a greater facility to learn a foreign language. How true is her observation?
I have heard this before. How true? I’m not sure. Given that music is a kind of language, particularly in its written form, it possibly uses similar parts of the brain as language.
Pure speculation, but I’ve always assumed that people with good musical skills are probably better at picking up other languages simply because they are more apt to pay attention to the actual sounds. Thereby, they should have a more trained ear to picking out pitches, sounds, and other nuances an untrained ear may not hear. That’s one idea. Musicians I’ve met have on a whole seemed to pick up accents much quicker than non-musical types in language classes.
Secondly, I would posit that when learning music, you do end up learning quite a bit of Italian, German and the such as most classical music requires you to know some basic terms in these languages. That said, knowing words like “marcato,” “allegro con brio,” and “frisch und munter” probably won’t help you much in asking directions to the nearest hostel, but it does at least introduce you and familiarize you with other languages.
Thirdly, Skogcat’s hypothesis sounds reasonable, but I’ve no data to support or reject that. So that’s my speculation, at any rate.
Wasn’t there a study recently that found musical people had a bigger part to their brain?
…ah yeah…
I wonder if the language part of the brain & the music part of the brain are the same: My sister worked as a music therapist with stroke patients who had aphasia, & many times, patients who could not talk were able to sing.
I heard an extended report on NPR a few years ago discussing work done in this area. Using some technique, probably PET scans, they determined that people who have the gift of “perfect pitch” process music with the language part of their brains, instead of whatever part the rest of us use.
Perfect pitch is the ability to tell what note is being played, isolated from any other notes. If you walk up to a piano and hit the F# key, a person with perfect pitch will be able to tell you that it was F#. Supposedly, when they hear a musical piece played in a transposed key, it takes on a whole different character for them, while the rest of us wouldn’t even notice.
CurtC ,
I’ve also heard about researches/studies about the perfect pitch. Actually, it’s a subject that’s been studied since a while. I remember an article I read around 1993 about a researcher in Arizona who was attempting to isolate what he thought could be the gene responsible for perfect pitch. I’ve lost track of that thing, though. I wonder if he has discovered anything at all.
CurtC ,
I’ve also heard about researches/studies about the perfect pitch. Actually, it’s a subject that’s been studied since a while. I remember an article I read around 1993 about a researcher in Arizona who was attempting to isolate what he thought could be the gene responsible for perfect pitch. I’ve lost track of that thing, though. I wonder if he has discovered anything at all.