Are there hidden benefits to music lessons?
Print version: page 16 Music lessons may offer children intellectual benefits and fine-tune their sensitivity to emotion in speech, according to research by two University of Toronto psychologists presented at APA’s 2003 Annual Convention. In one of the reported studies–in press at Psychological Science–E. Glenn Schellenberg, PhD, recruited 144 6-year-olds to take free weekly arts lessons at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto for one year. He randomly assigned children to either keyboard or voice lessons–the experimental groups–or drama lessons or no lessons–the control groups. The drama lessons served to control for increases in IQ that could result from participation in any extracurricular activity, said Schellenberg. He tested children’s IQ before and after the year of lessons, and found that while IQs increased across the board by about 4.5 points because of attending a year of school, scores for the children in the music groups increased an additional 2.5 points. That
