The findings suggested that piano lessons may have specific effect on the children's ability to distinguish different pitches which helped them to better distinguish different words. However it did not appear to confer any benefit for overall cognitive ability as measured by IQ attention span and working memory the researchers said. The children didn't differ in the more broad cognitive measures but they did show some improvements in word discrimination particularly for consonants. The piano group showed the best improvement there said Robert Desimone from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The study published in the journal Proceedings of the
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