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Research studies have shown that music and language have a correlation between them to the human mind and support the close relationship between music and language functions. There is evidence that speech functions can benefit from music functions and vice versa. One is example is that phonological awareness, pivotal for reading and writing skills, is closely related to pitch awareness and musical expertise. Some research papers also discuss the relationship between tonal language expertise and musical pitch perception skills and on whether pitch-processing deficits might influence tonal language perception. Overall all, these studies provide a comprehensive summary of the current knowledge on the tight relationship between music and language functions.

Recent History of Our Struggle to Make Foreign Languages Core Foreign language study is in the national education Goals 2000, which states: "By the year 2000 all American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign language, civics and government, arts, history, and geography..."

Can babies learn to read? While parents use DVDs and other media in an attempt to teach their infants to read, these tools don't instill reading skills in babies, a study by researchers at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development has found. In their study, which appears in the Journal of Educational Psychology, the researchers examined 117 infants, aged nine to 18 months, who were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Children in the treatment condition received a baby media product, which included DVDs, word and picture flashcards, and flip books to be used daily over a seven-month period; children in the control condition did not receive these materials from the researchers. Over the course of seven months, the researchers conducted a home visit, four laboratory visits, and monthly assessments of language development. To test children's emerging skills in the laboratory, the researchers examined the capacity to recognize letter names, letter sounds, vocabulary, words identified on sight, and comprehension. A combination of eye-tracking tasks and standardized measures were used to study outcomes at each stage of development. Using a state-of-the art eye-tracking technology, which follows even the slightest eye movements, the researchers were able to closely monitor how the infants distributed their attention and how they shifted their gaze from one location to another when shown specific words and phrases. No discernible differences were observed between the results of the experimental group vs. the control; yet parents of the infants in the experimental group perceived that their children were, in fact, acquiring words. :-)

A study conducted by neuroscientists from Northwestern University showed that the adolescent brain still has a considerable amount of neuroplasticity. The study also verified that music students developed improvements in auditory processing, which is crucial for verbal processing.

A connection has been found between students who study foreign language and higher SAT scores. For each additional year that students study a foreign language, they are expected to perform better on both the math and language portions of the SAT. Although the SAT is not a direct measure of intelligence by any means, this gives evidence to support that studying a foreign language helps develop both math and English language skills. I would be interested in seeing how foreign language study affects IQ Test scores.

Developing language skills appears to be more important for boys than girls in helping them to develop self-control and, ultimately, succeed in school, according to a study led by a Michigan State University researcher. Language skills -- specifically the building of vocabulary -- help children regulate their emotions and behavior and that boys lag behind girls in both language skills and self-regulation. The researchers noted that while girls overall seemed to have a more natural ability to control themselves and focus, boys with a strong vocabulary showed a dramatic increase in this ability to self-regulate -- even doing as well in this regard as girls with a strong vocabulary.

It has been nearly 20 years since a landmark education study found that by age 3, children from low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than more affluent children, putting them at an educational disadvantage before they even began school. Now, a growing body of research is challenging the notion that merely exposing poor children to more language is enough to overcome the deficits they face. The quality of the communication between children and their parents and caregivers, the researchers say, is of much greater importance than the number of words a child hears.

Dr. Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, conducted a 2010 study, "Can preference for background music mediate the irrelevant sound effect?", that shows how music can interfere with short-term memory performance. Perham had subjects conduct a certain task, in this case recalling a series of numbers, while listening to different kinds of background music. If sound exhibits acoustical variations, or what Perham calls an "acute changing-state," performance is impaired. Steady-state sounds with little acoustical variation don't impair performance nearly as much. Perham asked his subjects how they thought they performed when exposed to different tastes in music. Each reported performing much worse when listening to disliked music, although the study's results showed no difference. However, Perham found no distinction in performance, regardless of whether the music was liked or disliked: both were "worse than the quiet control condition. Both impaired performance on serial-recall tasks." The interviewer queried how curious how prevalent serial-recall is in everyday life, and if one could get by without developing this skill. Unlikely, Perham says, as one would have tremendous difficulty recalling phone numbers, doing mental arithmetic, and even learning languages. "Requiring the learning of ordered information has also been found to underpin language learning. If you consider language, learning syntax of language, learning the rules that govern how we put a sentence together, all of these require order information . . . " Perham says.

Babies who engage in musical play may have an easier time picking up language skills, a recent study says. U.S. researchers compared 9-month-old babies who played with toys and trucks to those who practiced banging out a rhythm during a series of play sessions.

Using a brain-imaging technique that examines the entire infant brain, University of Washington researchers have found that the anatomy of certain brain areas - the hippocampus and cerebellum - can predict children's language abilities at one year of age. Infants with a greater concentration of gray and white matter in the cerebellum and the hippocampus showed greater language ability at age 1, as measured by babbling, recognition of familiar names and words, and ability to produce different types of sounds. This is the first study to identify a relationship between language and the cerebellum and hippocampus in infants. Neither brain area is well-known for its role in language: the cerebellum is typically linked to motor learning, while the hippocampus is commonly recognized as a memory processor. "Looking at the whole brain produced a surprising result and scientists live for surprises. It wasn't the language areas of the infant brain that predicted their future linguistic skills, but instead brain areas linked to motor abilities and memory processing," Kuhl said. "Infants have to listen and memorize the sound patterns used by the people in their culture, and then coax their own mouths and tongues to make these sounds in order join the social conversation and get a response from their parents." The findings could reflect infants' abilities to master the motor planning for speech and to develop the memory requirements for keeping the sound patterns in mind. "The brain uses many general skills to learn language," Kuhl said. "Knowing which brain regions are linked to this early learning could help identify children with developmental disabilities and provide them with early interventions that will steer them back toward a typical developmental path."

Short article about another study done that proved texting actually helps the development of children's spelling skills and IQ level.

A good working memory is perhaps the brain's most important system when it comes to learning a new language. But it appears that working memory is first and foremost determined by our genes. Mila Vulchanova, a professor at NTNU's Department of Modern Foreign Languages, led a study of approximately one hundred ten-year-old elementary school students from Norway. Her research suggests that a good working memory is a decisive factor in developing good language skills and competency. Vulchanova states, "Not only is working memory important in learning new words, it is also important in our general language competence, in areas such as grammar skills. Working memory is connected to our ability to gather information and work with it, and to store and manipulate linguistic inputs as well as other inputs in the brain." Vulchanova's results run contrary to some conventional assumptions in both linguistics and cognitive sciences. Quite often it is believed that children acquire languages regardless of their cognitive abilities, such as perception, spatial understanding, and working memory. In other words, children don't need to learn language per se. It just comes on its own. The results from Vulchanova's research contradict this idea. Not only did the researchers find out that there is a close relationship between language competence in the first language and working memory, but that language competence in the mother tongue correlated highly with skills in a foreign language. "We have found evidence that there is a link between language development and the capacity of our working memory, and that there are common cognitive mechanisms that support the ability to learn both your mother tongue and a second language," Vulchanova says. "This is important, because it has been the tradition in linguistics to maintain that learning your native language is qualitatively different from learning a foreign language," she says.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a Japanese primatologist, has spent 30 years studying our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, to better understand the human mind. Here are some key takeaways: -Captive chimps can learn sign language or other communication techniques. They also can string together the symbols or gestures for words in simple "Me Tarzan, You Jane" combinations. -The animals use pant-hoots, grunts and screams to communicate. -In decades of ape language experiments, the chimpanzees have never demonstrated a human's innate ability to learn massive vocabularies, embed one thought within another or follow a set of untaught rules called grammar. So yes, chimpanzees can learn words. But so can dogs, parrots, dolphins and even sea lions. Words do not language make. Chimpanzees may well routinely master more words and phrases than other species, but a 3-year-old human has far more complex and sophisticated communication skills than a chimpanzee. "I do not say chimpanzees have language," Matsuzawa stresses. "They have language-like skills." -Monkeys can learn to use tools and do utilize tools, but there doesn't seem to be signs of them "teaching" each other these skills: it's more of a watch, then do situation.

Scientists are reporting in the journal Science that they have identified specialized brain cells that help us understand what a speaker really means. These cells do this by keeping track of changes in the pitch of the voice. "We found that there were groups of neurons that were specialized and dedicated just for the processing of pitch," says Dr. Eddie Chang, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. Chang says these neurons allow the brain to detect "the melody of speech," or intonation, while other specialized brain cells identify vowels and consonants. "Intonation is about how we say things," Chang says. "It's important because we can change the meaning, even - without actually changing the words themselves." The identification of specialized cells that track intonation shows just how much importance the human brain assigns to hearing, says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist who runs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. "Processing sound is one of the most complex jobs that we ask our brain to do," Kraus says. And it's a skill that some brains learn better than others, she says. Apparently, musicians, according to a study conducted by Kraus, are better than non-musicians at recognizing the subtle tonal changes found in Mandarin Chinese. On the other hand, recognizing intonation is a skill that's often impaired in people with autism, Kraus says. "A typically developing child will process those pitch contours very precisely," Kraus says. "But some kids on the autism spectrum don't. They understand the words you are saying, but they are not understanding how you mean it." The new study suggests that may be because the brain cells that usually keep track of pitch aren't working the way they should.

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

"School-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus ... For the current study, the researchers conducted brain scans on 92 of the children who had had symptoms of depression or were mentally healthy when they were studied as preschoolers. The imaging revealed that children without depression who had been nurtured had a hippocampus almost 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. ... Although 95 percent of the parents whose nurturing skills were evaluated during the earlier study were biological mothers, the researchers say that the effects of nurturing on the brain are likely to be the same for any primary caregiver - whether they are fathers, grandparents or adoptive parents."

A new Northwestern University study shows the power of language in infants' ability to understand the intentions of others. The results, based on two experiments, show that introducing a novel word for the impending novel event had a powerful effect on the infants' tendency to imitate the behavior. Infants were more likely to imitate behavior, however unconventional, if it had been named, than if it remained unnamed, the study shows. Sandra Waxman, co-author of the study, states, "This is the first demonstration of how infants' keen observational skills, when augmented by human language, heighten their acuity for 'reading' the underlying intentions of their 'tutors' (adults) and foster infants' imitation of adults' actions."

"Psychologists had already suspected that language was important for understanding numbers. Earlier studies of two tribes in the Amazon - one that had no words for numbers greater than five and another whose counting system seemed to go "one, two, many" - showed that people in those tribes had trouble reporting exactly how many objects were placed in front of them. But in those cultures, which don't have monetary systems, there might be no need to represent large numbers exactly. The question posed was whether language kept those Amazonian people from counting, or a lack of cultural pressure. To address that question, Spaepen and colleagues turned to Nicaraguan homesigners, deaf people who communicate with their hearing friends and relatives entirely through made-up hand gestures."

The age at which children learn a second language can have a significant bearing on the structure of their adult brain, according to a new joint study by the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital -- The Neuro at McGill University and Oxford University. The study concludes that the pattern of brain development is similar if you learn one or two language from birth. However, learning a second language later on in childhood after gaining proficiency in the first (native) language does in fact modify the brain's structure, specifically the brain's inferior frontal cortex. The left inferior frontal cortex became thicker and the right inferior frontal cortex became thinner. The cortex is a multi-layered mass of neurons that plays a major role in cognitive functions such as thought, language, consciousness and memory. The study suggests that the task of acquiring a second language after infancy stimulates new neural growth and connections among neurons in ways seen in acquiring complex motor skills such as juggling. The study's authors speculate that the difficulty that some people have in learning a second language later in life could be explained at the structural level.