EFFECT OF MUSIC ON THE BRAIN OF CHILDREN WITH LANGUAGE PROBLEMS

Children with language disorders often present persistent difficulties in phonological processing, prosody, auditory discrimination, and verbal fluency, which significantly impact academic achievement, social interaction, and emotional well-being. Growing neuroscientific evidence suggests that such impairments are linked not only to focal language networks, but also to broader alterations in neural connectivity and executive control. In this context, music emerges as a uniquely powerful intervention, as it engages distributed brain networks involved in auditory perception, motor coordination, attention, memory, emotion, and reward.

The present project investigates the effects of structured musical training on brain function and language-related outcomes in a cohort of 20 children with language impairments secondary to neurological disorders associated with different rare diseases. Using an interdisciplinary approach integrating neuroscience, music education, and developmental psychology, the study examines how systematic musical practice modulates neural plasticity and supports language processing at behavioral and neural levels. The intervention targets rhythmic, melodic, and prosodic components of music, closely aligned with the temporal and spectral features of spoken language.

A longitudinal design combines pre- and post-intervention assessments of linguistic performance, cognitive and emotional variables with neuroimaging measures, including functional magnetic resonance imaging. Results show significant dose-dependent changes related to the number of hours of musical training received, both in functional connectivity and in neural responses to musical and linguistic stimuli, indicating enhanced extraction, integration, and comprehension of incoming acoustic information.

This framework supports neurobiologically informed interventions for rare neurological diseases.