Music Training Can Be a Literacy Superpower

Holly Korbey June 23, 2022  When kids study music—intensively and over long periods of time—they become better readers. Here’s what’s at play.

Music training improves the process of reading first by sharpening the brain’s attention to sound; as a child learns to read and play or sing specific notes, the brain’s ability to separate parallel units of sound that make up words, called phonemes, becomes more acute, says neurobiologist Nina Kraus, author of Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World.