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by music and speech processing, namely, temporal pat- tern recognition and error detection, is strengthened by the music intervention. Still, future research is needed to examine directly whether higher cognitive skills would, in fact, be affected by infant music intervention.
Clinical Application/Treatment Studies
One of the long-term goals for understanding the effects of early music training lies in the application for clinical populations. As we start to understand the underlying mechanisms supporting the transfer effects from early music training to speech processing and general cognitive abilities, we can start leveraging music as an alternative early intervention method to treat developmental com- munication disorders. New applied intervention studies have emerged in the last few years. For example, a group of children between 8 and 11 years with a diagnosis of dyslexia were randomly assigned to a 30-week-long music intervention versus conventional treatment. While both groups improved, the music intervention group outperformed the control group in several key measures, including reading accuracy, phonological awareness, and rhythmic abilities (Flaugnacco et al., 2015).
Virtala and Partanan (2018) reported an on-going inter- vention with infants at risk for dyslexia. At-risk infants were randomly assigned to vocal music intervention, pas- sive instrumental music listening intervention, and no intervention at birth. The intervention lasts for 6 months and the infants’ neural processing of speech sounds were measured at 6 months and will again be measured at 2.5 years, along with comprehensive neurological tests. Pre- liminary results from 6-month-old infants already shows that their neural responses to sounds and communicative skills are related to the amount of music intervention the infants are receiving. Complete results from such stud- ies will open new directions in research that address the efficacy of music intervention to ameliorate early com- munication disorders.
Summary
To summarize, we reviewed a considerable amount of evidence supporting the idea that early music training affects brain development. Ongoing research continues to elucidate the mechanisms underlying these effects. For example, what are the most important elements in music training to generate the transfer effects? What is the extent to which music training can affect brain
development, for example, can it affect math skills (Vaughn, 2000)? Furthermore, the potential importance of music training for clinical populations with commu- nication disorders is also emerging through new clinical studies. Are the effects from music training observed from typically developing children the same for children with/at-risk for communication disorders? Would certain types of music intervention, such as singing, be more effective as a treatment? Indeed, these new directions make the study of music intervention in clinical popula- tions one of the new frontiers in the science of music and its effects on the brain.
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