This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Musicians are said to have better language skills and scientific studies have backed that up.

But it's not clear why that might be the case.

Now a study of 74 Chinese kindergartners suggest six months of piano lessons can heighten the brain's response to changes in pitch.

And kids who got piano lessons were also better at telling apart two similar sounding

Mandarin words, which contained different consonants,

than were students who got extra reading training or who just

went through regular kindergarten. The results are in the proceedings of the National

Academy of Sciences. Mandarin is a tonal language, the famous example being the word ma, which can mean mother or horse depending on its pitch.

So might musical training translate better to Mandarin than it would to English?

Yeah, it's possible to influence results.

Robert Decamone, a neuroscientist at the McGovern Institute at MIT.

But he says other studies do back up the fact that music lessons benefit language learners even in countries

without tonal languages. And what our study added on top of that was also some idea

of the neural basis for those benefits. And if you don't own a piano, don't despair. The reading group

actually did just as good on many measures as the piano group.

Reading is pretty good actually. We don't mean to down play reading instruction.

More important, he says, was to show piano wasn't actually worse than reading for these skills,

perhaps encouraging cash-strapped schools to keep their music programs alive. Thanks for Scientific American's 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.