ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between music and other cognitive abilities, with emphases on language skills, mathematical and visuospatial abilities, executive function, auditory perception, and IQ. The relation between music training and language skills has been well-documented using both cross-sectional studies and longitudinal studies. Several decades of neuroscience and psychology research have deepened the knowledge base surrounding the old aphorism that "music makes you smarter." Cross-sectional studies comparing musicians and non-musicians revealed that children and adults with at least four years of formal music education were better at detecting violations of sentence-final pitch contour than non-musicians. A relationship between musical abilities and prosody sensitivity has also been found for the perception of the rhythmic cues afforded by the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in the speech signal. Sensitivity to rhythm and pitch appear to be particularly important for grammatical processing. Prosody sensitivity also plays an important role in the acquisition of reading skills.
