Effects of short-term music and second-language training on executive control

• Brief training in music or French improved children’s executive control performance.
• Improvement only on tasks that involved executive control.
• Few differences between effects of the two training programs.
• Demonstrates power of short training to modify cognitive performance.

Separate lines of research have identified enhanced performance on nonverbal executive control (EC) tasks for bilinguals and those with music training, but little is known about the relation between them in terms of the specificity of the effects of each experience or the degree of exposure necessary to induce these changes. Using an intervention design, the current study pseudorandomly assigned 57 4- to 6-year-old children (matched on age, maternal education, and cognitive scores) to a 20-day training program offering instruction in either music or conversational French. The test battery consisted of verbal and nonverbal tasks requiring EC. All children improved on these tasks following training with some training-specific differences. No changes were observed on background or working memory measures after either training, ruling out simple practice effects. Children in both groups had better scores on the most challenging condition of a grammaticality sentence judgment task in which it was necessary to ignore conflict introduced through misleading semantic content. Children in both training groups also showed better accuracy on the easier condition of a nonverbal visual search task at post-test, but children in the French training group also showed significant improvement on the more challenging condition of this task. These results are discussed in terms of emergent EC benefits of language and music training.