14 DAY TRIAL // According to new research, children who play musical instruments for more than three years in a row are much more likely to score better in aptitude tests than kids who don't play any instrument. The study, detailing the find, was published in the PloS ONE open-access journal, by a team of researchers based at Harvard. The results also showed that young musicians did better in visual pattern completion and verbal skill tests, though these are not usually associated with the influence of music.
The research team, led by Drs. Ellen Winner and Gottfried Schlaug, tested 41 children who played stringed musical instruments, including piano, violin, double bass and others, for more than 3 years, against 18 children that only received basic musical training in school. On average, each child in the study had received some 30 to 40 minutes of music ed in schools per week.
However, the 41 kids also took private lessons and practiced alone at home for a couple of hours a day. In auditory discrimination and finger dexterity tests – skills normally associated with playing music – the group scored much higher than that of children who played no instrument. What puzzled the scientists was that the first group also scored significantly higher on visual pattern completion and verbal skill tests, measured by Raven's Progressive Matrices and vocabulary IQ tests, respectively.
Furthermore, the study revealed that the more children study their instrument, the better their results become. And that's considering all tests. The reason why these results occurred is a challenge for scientists, as vocabulary was not associated with playing music before, except in the case of children actually learning to sing, or subjected to music even when inside their mothers' womb.
The Harvard team concluded that further studies on the intricate relations that music forms inside the brain are needed, in order for them to be able to answer why the results of the current study turned out the way they did.