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Laurel Trainor, director of the Institute for Music and the Mind at
McMaster University in West Hamilton, Ontario, and colleagues compared
preschool children who had taken music lessons with those who did not.
Those with some training showed larger brain responses on a number of
sound recognition tests given to the children. Her research indicated
that musical training appears to modify the brain's auditory cortex.

Even a year or two of music training leads
to enhanced levels of memory and attention when measured by the same
type of tests that monitor electrical and magnetic impulses in the
brain.

“We therefore hypothesize that musical training (but not necessarily
passive listening to music) affects attention and memory, which
provides a mechanism whereby musical training might lead to better
learning across a number of domains," Trainor said.

Carol L. Tilley, a professor of library and information science at Illinois, says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of literature, and children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other types of books.

If reading is to lead to any meaningful knowledge or comprehension, readers must approach a text with an understanding of the relevant social, linguistic and cultural conventions," she said. "And if you really consider how the pictures and words work together in consonance to tell a story, you can make the case that comics are just as complex as any other kind of literature.

Although commercial publishers of comics have yet to recapture children's imaginations, Tilley says that some librarians and teachers are increasingly discovering that comics can be used to support reading and instruction.