Puerta Vallarta Daily News – Christina Zhao 
Music training early in life (before the age of seven) can have a wide range of benefits beyond musical ability. For instance, school-age children (six to eight years old) who participated in two years of musical classes four hours each week showed better brain responses to consonants compared with their peers who started one year later. This suggests that music experience helped children hear speech sounds…Language is just one example of a skill that can be improved through music training. Music can help with social-emotional development, too…Another researcher, Laura Cirelli, showed that 14-month-old babies were more likely to show helping behaviors toward an adult after the babies had been bounced in sync with the adult who was also moving rhythmically. There are many more exciting questions that remain to be answered as researchers continue to study the effects of music experience on early development.(more)