PSYC56H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Music Therapy, Anvari, Speech Perception
Document Summary
The evidence for neural plasticity as a result of musical training offers potential for the use of musical training for therapeutic purposes. Behavioural studies have shown mixed evidence for transfer effects between music and: spatio-temporal abilities, mathematics, reading, speech prosody, verbal memory, general intelligence. However, these results need to be taken with a grain of salt usually it"s hard to match the differences between groups of musicians and non-musicians. Musical expertise has, however, shown to improve several aspects of auditory processing. Furthermore, the results of brain imaging experiments have shown that music training can improve some extra- musical abilities, like digit span and reading complex words. However, these results support the growing evidence that music and speech share common processes. Presumably, is this is the case, you could improve some of the processes in music processing and also see improvements in speech perception and reading skills.
