New Evidence that Musical Training Increases Speech Sensitivity

This article summarizes some interesting findings of researchers at Northwestern University:

Research Finds Musical Training Can 'Tune' the Auditory System

It turns out that musical training not only affects one's ability to decipher "sound encoding" in music but also in language. In the study, musically trained subjects faired far better in recognizing tone-sounds in Mandarin than non-musicians. In certain languages such as Mandarin, "tones" (when pitch rises, falls, or stays the same during the utterance of a word) can render different meanings for the same word. The researchers agree that this new evidence has far-reaching implications for educators and brain researchers.