Serial-order and rule-learning abilities in children with musical training

Abstract

Playing a musical instrument is an engaging, challenging activity that has been linked to benefits in several cognitive domains, including language. Insofar, these benefits have been traced back to working memory abilities related to order information, as both language and music are highly complex signals that require maintaining temporally embedded structures unfolding over time. Yet, the critical question remains open as to whether the positive effects of music experience also extend to another constituent element of language learning, namely the complex process of encoding and generalizing abstract structures from item positions in sequences (i.e., rule learning). Here, we investigated this question by comparing the performance of two groups of 8- to 11-year-old children with (N = 33) and without (N = 33) music training in three visual memory tasks aimed to test Item short-term memory, Serial-Order memory, and Rule-Learning abilities. Results showed that children with at least 1 year of instrumental music training tend to perform better than their non-musician peers not only in the Item and Serial-Order memory tasks but also in the Rule-Learning task, where they abstracted ABAB or ABBA rule-like structures from sequences of visual shapes and generalized them to novel shapes. This trend persisted even after controlling for parental education and other socioeconomic factors, providing new evidence that the effects of music training spread to cognitive domains not necessarily linked to music or audition, as they boost the ability to abstract high-order structures from any potential learning environment. This evidence may prove crucial in clarifying the mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of music-based interventions in language learning disabilities.