LISTENING TO MUSIC AND READING COMPREHENSION

Music is Language, Language is Music

THE NEW PEDAGOGY AN INTERDISCIPLINARY MODEL Integrate Literacy, Music and Technology into the Classroom.

BBC - Ballads were responsible for spreading Literacy. Cite
The Roots of Print, Power, Politics, Literacy, Ballads, Plays.
Listen to 17th Century Print Culture Who is Allowed to Know?

We are finding that musical training can alter the nervous system to create a better learner... ” Dr Nina Kraus 8/4/14 Musical training 'can improve language and reading' Learning to sing or play a musical instrument can help disadvantaged children improve their reading skills, US research suggests. After a year of music lessons, the reading scores of nine and 10-year-olds held steady compared to a dip seen in those who were not taught any music. Another group of musically-trained children were found to be better at processing sounds and language. After two years of musical training, the results showed the musical group was faster and more accurate at distinguishing one sound from another, particularly when there was background noise, compared to a group that did not participate in any musical activity. Dr Kraus said this showed music could have a positive impact on the brain, which could also help learning, but it was not a quick fix. "Research has shown that there are differences in the brains of children raised in impoverished environments that affect their ability to learn," he explained. "While more affluent students do better in school than children from lower income backgrounds, we are finding that musical training can alter the nervous system to create a better learner and help offset this academic gap." All the children had similar IQs and reading ability at the start of the study. Dr Kraus said music appeared to remodel the brain to improve the connections between sounds and meaning, the process by which babies learn to speak. Children growing up in poorer areas with poorly-educated mothers are more likely to have 'noisier brains', she said. This is because they are less likely to know and recognise a wide range of words and are therefore less able to respond to sounds and language. "Music automatically sharpens the nervous system's response to sounds," Dr Kraus explained. The children participating in the study were part of the Harmony Project, which provides instruments and free music tuition for American schoolchildren in certain deprived urban areas.
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It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing . . .
~ Duke Ellington

"Make everything as simple as possible,
but no simpler".
~ Albert Einstein

Evolutionary Science:
Music is communication, Music is language.
We hear and process all language as sound first and THEN we process the sound as as meaning something which we call a language.

Remember we are animal and we will respond to a growl - hearing it as something dangerous - and that has meaning which will let us survive.
As language develops some cultures pay attention to the pitch of the word and the rhythm of the word. In all cultures, If it doesn't have the right rhythm nobody will understand.

Hear: Cab Calloway: Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing.

"I was so happy first learning to sing the songs and then how to write."
http://www.latimes.com/News/nationworld/world/la-041502nushu.story
Nüshu, Women's Secret Script - Yang learned alongside a neighbor girl, Gao Yinxian, who eventually became a prolific nushu author. "I was about 10 years old or so," Yang said. See Link

1. What I Can Do to Comprehend During Reading
2. EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE & CULTURE - HUMAN SYNCRONY
3. Music Makes You Smarter Research over 30 research articles
4. Study Ties Mental Abilities To Interaction of Emotion and Cognitive Skills
5. Learn about Rhythm Syllables
6. Languages' rhythm and language acquisition by Franck Ramus
   EHESS doctoral dissertation defended 25/11/99 Discipline: Cognitive Science
7. Journal of Research in Music Education 35, 4: 221-235.
   This article compared alternative methods of teaching rhythm.
   Second- and third-graders were divided into four groups--a control group, a group which used Kodaly syllables, a group which used Gordon syllables, and a group which used meaningful words, such as "Washington" and "Mississippi." The four groups were pre-tested and post-tested on recognition, dictation, and performance. The most significant finding was that the Washington-Mississippi group scored best in the performance post-test.
8. Learn about the rhythmic structure of human speech communication, speech and music connection and Interdisciplinary Social Rhythm Researchers.
9. Mandarin, is a tone language. In tone languages, a single word can differ in meaning depending on pitch patterns called "tones." For example, the Mandarin word "mi" delivered in a level tone means "to squint," in a rising tone means "to bewilder," and in a dipping (falling then rising) tone means "rice." English, on the other hand, only uses pitch to reflect intonation (as when rising pitch is used in questions).
10. 2007 Research finds music training 'tunes' human auditory system
    Provides concrete evidence that playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem's sensitivity to speech sounds. This finding has broad implications because it applies to sound encoding skills involved not only in music but also in language.
    The findings indicate that experience with music at a young age in effect can "fine-tune" the brain's auditory system. "Increasing music experience appears to benefit all children -- whether musically exceptional or not -- in a wide range of learning activities," says Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory and senior author of the study. "Our findings underscore the pervasive impact of musical training on neurological development. Yet music classes are often among the first to be cut when school budgets get tight. That's a mistake," says Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology and Physiology and professor of communication sciences and disorders. "Our study is the first to ask whether enhancing the sound environment -- in this case with musical training -- will positively affect the way an individual encodes sound even at a level as basic as the brainstem," says Patrick Wong, primary author of "Musical Experience Shapes Human Brainstem Encoding of Linguistic Pitch Patterns." An old structure from an evolutionary standpoint, the brainstem once was thought to only play a passive role in auditory processing.
    Using a novel experimental design, the researchers presented the Mandarin word "mi" to 20 adults as they watched a movie. Half had at least six years of musical instrument training starting before the age of 12. The other half had minimal (less than 2 years) or no musical training. As the subjects watched the movie, the researchers used electrophysiological methods to measure and graph the accuracy of their brainstem ability to track the three differently pitched "mi" sounds.
    "Even with their attention focused on the movie and though the sounds had no linguistic or musical meaning for them, we found our musically trained subjects were far better at tracking the three different tones than the non-musicians," says Wong, director of Northwestern's Speech Research Laboratory and assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders. "We've found that by playing music -- an action thought of as a function of the neocortex -- a person may actually be tuning the brainstem," says Kraus. "This suggests that the relationship between the brainstem and neocortex is a dynamic and reciprocal one and tells us that our basic sensory circuitry is more malleable than we previously thought."

While LISTENING takes place: Eyes vs. Ears

• There is more activation in the left-hemisphere brain region called the pars triangularis (the triangular section), a part of Broca's area (sometimes called verbal working memory) that usually activates when there is language processing to be done or there is a requirement to maintain some verbal information in an active state.
• The greater amount of activation in Broca's area suggests that there is more semantic processing and working memory storage in listening comprehension than in reading.
• Because spoken language is so temporary, each sound hanging in the air for a fraction of a second, the brain is forced to immediately process or store the various parts of a spoken sentence in order to be able to mentally glue them back together in a conceptual frame that makes sense.
• Written language provides an external memory where information can be re-read if necessary. To remember what you've heard you need to re-play spoken language, you need a mental play-back loop, (called the articulatory-phonological loop) conveniently provided in part by Broca's area.

How the Brain Works

• A study of the effect of music on the behavior of slow learners - Anne Savan, Aberdare Boys School, Aberdare
  It has been observed that lack of co-ordination in children with special educational needs causes frustration, which results in angry, disruptive behaviour. During a five-month period a group of ten children with special educational needs were bombarded with sound by playing orchestral music(mainly Mozart) during normal learning activities. The resultant effect on their behaviour was remarkable. The pupils became calm and co-operative within minutes of the music being switched on. The effect lasted for the duration of the lesson and was repeated every lesson for the whole of the five-month trial period. Controlled measurements of body temperature, blood pressure, breathing rate and pulse rate were made in an attempt to suggest a reason for the observations. The results indicate that the co-ordination centre of the brain may be stimulated by certain frequencies and the resultant effect is to slow down the whole body metabolism biochemically, producing a calming effect on the pupils.
• Just The Opposite of a calm mind that can focus are the babies who watch infant educational videos and TV. These are the kids at risk for developing ADD.
• Interdisciplinary Social Rhythm Researchers
• ABOUT THE BRAIN AND LEARNING
• HOW DOES THE BRAIN WORK?
• Why is Play Important to learning?
• Why is Laughter Important to learning?
• MUSIC MAKES YOU SMARTER RESEARCH
• Music and Intelligence citations PDF
• Intelligence is inherited controversary
• HOW DOES THE CEREBRAL CORTEX WORK?
  Learning, Attention, and Grouping by the Laminar Circuits of Visual Cortex by Stephen Grossberg* Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Center for Adaptive Systems Boston University.
• Abstract New Scientist 'New language circuit discovered in humans' points out that between 5-7 years of age is when people develop reading and writing skills.
• Controversial Theory Linking Reading Ability to Specific Brain Region Gets a Boost
  More than a century ago, a French neurologist suggested that a specific region of the brain processes the visual images of words. Without it, he postulated, people cannot read except by laboriously recognizing letter after letter, rather than whole words. Yet humans have only been able to read for several thousand years--perhaps not enough time for such a trait to evolve, some scientists have argued. New research, however, supports the idea that reading does rely on a localized set of neurons.
  Previous imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or positron emission tomography (PET) showed that a small region buried deep in the left rear of the brain lit up with activity when subjects read, or recognized words, as opposed to perceiving other objects, such as faces or tools. Victims of stroke with damage in this region often reported reading difficulty. But because stroke damage in these patients was never confined to this region alone and imaging studies can only demonstrate correlation, not causation, controversy persisted.
  Neurologist Laurent Cohen of the Hopital de la Salpetriere and his colleagues received a rare opportunity to explore this hole in scientific understanding when a 46-year-old epileptic came to them for treatment. His chronic seizures indicated that a small portion of his brain--roughly contiguous with the so-called visual word-form area--should be removed.
  Prior to removing the damaged section, the scientists performed a series of tests on the man, including a wide array of reading challenges and the temporary placement of electrodes in his brain. He proved normal in all regards, including his ability to quickly recognize words no matter how many letters they contained.
  But two weeks after the operation, though cured of his epilepsy, the patient complained of difficulty reading and tests showed that his ability to comprehend longer words had slowed by half. Even six months later, he needed roughly an additional 100 milliseconds for each additional letter to recognize a word.
  The finding seems to support the contention that this region of the brain is critical to reading, but it does not answer questions as to how it developed. "One possibility is that the [visual word-form area] performs a visual processing function that predisposed it to being co-opted for reading," Alex Martin of the National Institute of Mental Health writes in a commentary accompanying the paper in today's Neuron. Nevertheless, the French team has provided more evidence that this region is critical to your ability to read this article. --David Biello
• Rhythm, Melody and Harmony
  Stimulate several areas of the brain, suggesting that music could be used to help repair everything from damaged speech to damaged emotions.
• A Way with Words
• Do languages help mold the way we think? By JR Minkel
  A controversial idea from the 1930s is getting a second look.
• William Calvin's "The Cerebral Code" (MIT Press 1996).
  A proposed mechanism for word selection and articulation is the theory of hexagonal mosaics and Darwin machines
• BRAIN RESEARCH CONTINUES TO PROVIDE EVIDENCE CORRELATING THE STUDY OF MUSIC WITH INCREASED INTELLIGENCE
  New brain research has discovered that the area of the brain which allows us to understand whether a sentence makes sense, and processes the syntax or word arrangement in a sentence, also activates when people hear a musical chord in the wrong place in a traditional progression of chords.
  The evidence, found by Burkhard Maess and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig, Germany, suggests that the human brain recognizes the constituents of musical and linguistic sequences in the same way. "It looks like tonal syntax is closely analogous to the part of language we call grammar," says Carol Krumhansl, a psychologist at Cornell University in New York who studies music perception.
  The work is "very exciting," says Krumhansl because little is understood about why we possess an ability to appreciate music. Understanding how syntactic information is processed in the brain, "might provide some basic insight about why we have music," she argues.
  This research provides further confirmation that musical training enhances verbal abilities. Musical training refines the area of the brain necessary for reading and verbal skills.
  Source: Maess, B., Koelsch, S., Gunter, T. C. and Friederici, A. D. Musical Syntax is processed in Broca's area: an MEG study. Nature Neuroscience 4, 540-545 (2001).

Dr. James Catterall education professor at the University of California Los Angeles, found that students who were highly involved in the arts had higher grades and standardized test scores.

Playing music can be good for your brain Stanford study finds it helps the understanding of language. Carrie Sturrock, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, November 17, 2005Stanford University research has found for the first time that musical training improves how the brain processes the spoken word, a finding that researchers say could lead to improving the reading ability of children who have dyslexia and other reading problems.
The study, made public Wednesday, is the first to show that musical experience can help the brain improve its ability to distinguish between rapidly changing sounds that are key to understanding and using language.
The research also eventually could provide the "why" behind other studies that have found that playing a musical instrument has cognitive benefits.
"What this study shows, that's novel, is that there's a specific aspect of language ... that's changed in the minds and brains of people with musical training," said researcher John Gabrieli, a former Stanford psychology professor now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge

John D. E. Gabrieli, Ph.D. gabrieli@mit.edu
Grover Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology Gabrieli Lab
Building: 46-4033
phone: (617) 253-8946
Department of Psychology
448 Jordan Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Ph: (650)725-2430
Fax:(650)725-5699
gabrieli@psych.stanford.edu