Do music lessons or a second language boost executive function?
Long-trained musicians had better working memory than non-musicians across three tasks, but neither musicians nor bilinguals were better at resisting distraction, and being bilingual gave no cognitive advantage at all.
Source
Musical training, bilingualism, and executive function: working memory and inhibitory control
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Between-subjects 2 (musician vs non-musician) x 2 (bilingual vs monolingual) quasi-experimental comparison of young adults on three working-memory tasks and three inhibitory-control tasks, with frequentist and Bayesian ANOVAs and Holm correction
- N
- N=153 · 153 young adults in total; task Ns vary because the flanker task was added partway through (95 participants) and the operation span was run in a follow-up session with 54 of the original participants.
- Population
- Young adults recruited at Toronto universities, screened into monolingual musicians, monolingual non-musicians, bilingual musicians and bilingual non-musicians
- Outcome
- Working memory (backward digit span, reading span, operation span) and inhibitory control (Stroop, flanker, stop-signal reaction time)
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What they did
Young adults were grouped into four types: monolingual or bilingual, crossed with musicians (at least eight years of formal training and regular practice) or non-musicians (little or no training). Everyone completed tasks measuring working memory (holding and manipulating information) and inhibitory control (ignoring distractors or stopping a response). The groups were checked for differences in age, parental education and non-verbal IQ, and reading span was adjusted for vocabulary because it depends on English skill.
What they found
Musicians outperformed non-musicians on all three working-memory tasks, for example recalling on average 37.2 versus 25.5 letters on reading span after adjusting for vocabulary. On inhibitory control, musicians were faster on the flanker task overall, but this looked like general speed rather than better inhibition, and there were no reliable musician effects on the Stroop or stop-signal tasks. Bilinguals did not outperform monolinguals on any task, and being both bilingual and a musician gave no extra benefit. Bayesian analyses mostly supported these conclusions.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because people chose music lessons themselves, the study cannot show that musical training caused better working memory; people with stronger memory may be more likely to start or persist with music. Some tasks were run on only part of the sample (the operation span on a follow-up subset), which lowers power and prevented a combined multivariate analysis. Musicians and bilinguals had higher and lower vocabulary scores respectively, and the groups were defined by different criteria for each skill, so the two kinds of expertise are not matched in amount. The null bilingual result applies to young adults in one city; the authors also note a more conservative power analysis might have been preferable.
Key terms
- Bilingual advantage hypothesis
- The claim that managing two languages trains general executive control, giving bilinguals better performance on non-language cognitive tasks; recent replications have often failed to find it.
- Working memory
- The ability to hold information in mind and work with it over a few seconds, measured here by span tasks such as recalling digits backwards.
- Inhibitory control
- The ability to suppress distracting information or stop an automatic response, measured here with Stroop, flanker and stop-signal tasks.
- Complex span task
- A working-memory task that interleaves items to remember (letters) with a processing task (judging sentences or solving sums).
- Stop-signal reaction time (SSRT)
- An estimate of how quickly someone can cancel a response once a stop signal appears; shorter means better response inhibition.
- Bayes factor
- A ratio showing how much more likely the data are under one hypothesis than another, which can also provide evidence for no effect.
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Quiz yourself
Which ability showed a consistent musician advantage?
Common questions
Does this prove that learning an instrument improves memory?
No. It shows musicians have better working memory, but the study is correlational. Randomised training studies cited by the authors show little evidence that short-term music lessons cause these benefits.
Why use several tasks for each ability?
A single task can produce a quirky, task-specific effect. Finding a musician advantage on all three working-memory tasks makes it more likely to be a real difference in the ability itself.
Couldn't the reading span task be unfair to bilinguals?
Yes, which is why the authors adjusted it for English vocabulary and added a non-verbal operation span task. Bilinguals still showed no advantage.
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