Music and languages


Children who learn a musical instrument are more likely than non-players to be verbally agile in later life, according to a recent scientific study. Apparently, music improves intellectual ability and adults are significantly more adept at memorising new words and extending their vocabulary if they had music lessons as children. The study supports previous research which found that the left hemisphere of musicians’ brains is more highly developed than the left hemisphere of the brains of people who have never learnt to play an instrument. Three years ago, for example, a team of German scientists carried out experiments which proved this fact. They used brain scanners to show that good musicians had a well developed left hemisphere, especially the area of the brain which is involved in verbal memory.

Professor Agnes Chan and her colleagues at the University of Hong Kong compared 30 female students who had been taught to play music before the age of 12 with 30 students who had never taken music lessons. They tested the verbal memory of each subject by the number of words she could remember from a 16-word list which was presented orally three times to each subject. The study found that musically trained adults were able to learn, on average, 17 per cent more words than the others. But the two groups showed no difference in their visual memory, which is controlled largely by the right hemisphere of the brain. “People who received music training before the age of 12 have a better memory for spoken words than those who did not. It seems clear that learning a musical instrument in childhood may, therefore, have long-term positive effects on verbal memory”, professor Chan said.

Confronted with these results, some teachers working in the Foreign Languages Department of the University of Hong Kong said that having had musical education might help learning a foreign language but, they insisted, “nothing is more effective than real motivation, hard work, and a strong desire to communicate with people from other parts of the world”.

 

PART ONE: READING COMPREHENSION

1. Answer the following questions according to the information in the text.

a) Why don’t good musicians necessarily have good visual memory?

b) What did the German scientists mentioned in the text find out about good musicians?

c) How would you describe the attitude of the Hong Kong foreign language teachers in connection with the experiments reported in the text?

 

  PART TWO: WRITING
Choose ONE. Write about either 1 or 2.

Option A: Describe your personal feelings about music and the role music plays in your life.

Option B: You have a six-year-old younger brother. Your parents want to know your opinion on what might be the best way for him to learn a foreign language. Imagine the kind of conversation you would have and write it down. Don’t use real names or real data.


3. Vocabulary

Explain next words in English, write the phonetics and also an example: to improve, research, to carry out, to seem.