Speaking Mandarin May Offer Kids a Musical Edge

Kids who speak Mandarin， the primary language in China， may outperform kids who speak English in at least one aspect of musical （1） a — perceiving pitch.

Pitch refers to how high or low a sound's （2） f is. In tonal languages， such as Mandarin， pitch is very important. These languages use different pitch patterns to give （A） m to words. In Mandarin， a word like "ma" for （3） i ， could mean "mother" or "horse". Knowing which will depend on how it was spoken. The English language uses vowels and consonants to change the meaning of a word.

Sarah Creel led the new study. She works at the University of California， San Diego， where she studies how the brain perceives language and music. People who speak Mandarin may be better at detecting differences in pitch generally. "If you have to focus on pitch patterns a lot to understand what the people around you are saying， that may really hone your attention to pitch，" explains Creel. "And that （B）a to pitch in language then transfers to another domain." One such domain： music.

Creel and her colleagues conducted an experiment with roughly100 kids between the ages of three and five. Half lived in China， the rest in the United States. The （C） c listened to pairs of sounds. Then they reported whether the sounds in a pair had been the same or different. Some of the paired （D） s were exactly alike. Others were slightly different. Some， for instance， had differences in how low or high a sound was. Other pairs had the same pitch but were played by different instruments.

Both groups did equally well at identifying pairs of sounds from different （4） i . But Chinese kids were much better than the Americans at picking pairs of sounds having different pitches — almost 15 percentage points better.

The right side of the brain plays a crucial role in music. Languages， such as English and Mandarin， are mostly processed on the left side of the brain. But （5）r has shown that Mandarin tends to activate parts of the right side of the brain that English doesn't.

It is not yet clear， however， whether the advantage in perceiving pitch actually makes Chinese kids better musicians， Creel notes. The （E） a the Chinese children showed can be easily overcome by motivation， experience and training.

So if you want to spruce up your piano skills， maybe you should practice your piano lessons more， not head out to learn Chinese.

（A， B， C， D， E FOR CROSS， 1， 2， 3， 4， 5 FOR DOWN. The first letters of the absents were given.）