中美科研人员合作进行的一项新研究显示，弹钢琴有助于提高儿童辨别语音进而辨别词语的能力，但没有发现能改善儿童整体认知能力的证据。
Six months of piano lessons can heighten kindergartners' brain responses to different pitches[1], and improve their ability to tell apart two similar-sounding words. Christopher Intagliata reports.
[1]pitch这个词的意思非常多，这句话中它作名词，表示“音调”，英文解释为“The pitch of a sound is how high or low it is. ”，比如“He raised his voice to an even higher pitch. 他将嗓门提得更高了。”
由这个名词意义，引申出了一种动词意义，表示“使（音调）达到（指定水准）”，英文解释为“ If a sound is pitched at a particular level, it is produced at the level indicated. ”，比如“His cry is pitched at a level that makes it impossible to ignore. 他哭声之大让人不可能置若罔闻。”
还有一个动词意义这里也跟大家提一下：“迫使进入 (一种新的处境)”，英文解释为“ If someone is pitched into a new situation, they are suddenly forced into it. ”，比如“They were being pitched into a new adventure in which they would have to fight the whole world. 他们当时正被胁迫参与到一次不得不与整个世界抗衡的新冒险中。”
Piano Lessons Tune Up Language Skills
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 suggests 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 went through regular kindergarten.
The results are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Yun Nan et al., Piano training enhances the neural processing of pitch and improves speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children]
这项研究发表在最新一期美国《国家科学院学报》上，由美国麻省理工学院麦戈文脑科学研究所主任罗伯特·德西蒙、中国北京师范大学认知神经科学与学习国家重点实验室南云等研究人员共同完成。
Now Mandarin is a tonal[声调的；调性的] language—the famous example is the word 'ma' which can mean mother or horse depending on its pitch. So might musical training translate better to Mandarin, than, say, English?
"Yeah it's possible that influenced the results." Robert Desimone, 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 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's pretty good actually. We don't mean to downplay[2] reading instruction."
[2]downplay: to make something seem less important than it really is. 淡化…的重要性，对…轻描淡写
More important, he says, was to show piano wasn't worse than reading for these skills… perhaps encouraging cash-strapped [资金短缺的] schools to keep their music programs alive.
研究人员认为，钢琴训练可以让儿童对音乐中的音调差异更为敏感，从而使儿童辨别语音的能力更强。
但研究也显示，智商、注意力和记忆力等测试未显示出三组儿童存在任何差异，没有发现钢琴课改善儿童整体认知能力的证据。
—Christopher Intagliata
中文来源：新华网（仅供辅助理解）
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