Giving children music lessons won't just introduce them to music—it could also greatly improve their language skills but it isn't understood if this is a side effect of a general improvement of cognitive（认知的）skills, or something that directly affects language processing.
Now, we are getting closer to an answer, thanks to a study of 74 Chinese kindergarten children, led by Robert Desimone from MIT. For the study, Desimone's team chose children from the Chinese education system, with the support of education officials who wanted to see how it might improve their learning.
The 4 to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children in the study were divided into three groups. One group received a 45-minute piano lesson three times a week, while another received extra reading instruction classes. The third group acted as controls, taking no extra lessons beyond their usual classes.
The classes lasted for six months, after which the children were tested on their ability to tell words based on differences in tones, consonants（辅音）, or vowels（元音）. The test results showed that the children who had taken piano lessons performed better at telling the difference between words that differ by a single consonant, when compared with the children who took extra reading lessons. Compared to the control group, both the music learners and the extra reading group did better in telling the difference between words based on vowel differences.
"It looks like for recognizing differences between sounds, including speech sounds, it's better than extra reading. That means schools could pay more attention to music," Desimone says. "It's not worse than giving extra reading to the children, which is probably what many schools are trying to do—get rid of the art education and just have more reading. "
