Nursery World - Learning & Development: Music: Part 4

Communication, language and music are intrinsically linked, and it is important to understand this in the early years, writes Linda Pound

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Researchers from a wide range of disciplines – psychologists, musicologists, anthropologists, archaeologists and linguists – are in broad agreement about the important role of music in communication.

Professor Colwyn Trevarthen, working with colleague Stephen Malloch, following a lifetime researching communication between babies and their carers, argues that ‘our infinite varieties of communication, including spoken and written language, are all given life by our innate communicative musicality’.

LISTENING AND UNDERSTANDING

From our earliest days, musical elements are used to draw babies into communication with those around them (see box, overleaf). By changing the pitch and rhythms of everyday language, adults capture the attention of newborn babies and over time they use musical elements to highlight particular words or phrases.

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