Not all TCKs are multi-lingual, but a large portion of us are. We know how this benefits us in every day life, if we use the languages we speak. But do you know how being multi-lingual affects us beyond simply being able to communicate with more people?
I love playing the piano. I sometimes use playing the piano as a tool to relate to the rest of my life. I love singing, listening to music, creating music. I am a terrible dancer, but I still torture my children by making them dance around the kitchen with me. I have (to some extent) played the piano, guitar, pan pipes, and harmonica.
I'm also pretty good at learning new languages, at language pronunciation, and at accent mimicry. (Aussies, Kiwis, and Brits sound nothing alike, by the way).
Until doing research for this blog, I never really considered that the two skill sets might be related, but according to some recent research, language acquisition and use (for multiple languages) utilizes some of the same brain functions that recognizing and creating music does!
One recent study (Krizman, Marian, Shook, Skoe, & Kruas, 2012) found that when a person learns and uses two or more languages, their auditory system has to become more efficient in automatically processing sound, so that it can tell what language is being used and how to use it. This actually changes the physical structure of a bilingual's brain, to allow for "enhanced flexibility and efficiency of auditory processing." (Krizman, Marian, Shook, Skoe, & Kruas, 2012) This study argues that this is most likely an effect of the broader exposure a biligual has to sounds. When you are listening to more than one language, there is a lot more diversity of sounds, tones, grammar structures, and phonemes that you are processing and using than if you were to use and listen to only one language.
This study found that the other group of people who seemed to have the same level of automatic sound processing and differentiating was trained musicians! In other words, bilinguals' sound processing was comparable to that of a trained musician. Going the other direction: musicians appeared to be better able to decipher sounds in foreign languages that monolingual non-musicians were. Krizman, Marian, Shook, Skoe, and Kraus (2012) concluded from these experiments that:
[C]ontinuously manipulating sounds across two languages leads to an expertise in how sound is encoded in the bilingual brain...In both groups of auditory experts (i.e. musicians and biliguals), enhanced experience with sound results in an auditory system that highly efficient, flexible, and focused in its automatic sound processing, especially in challenging or novel listening conditions. (Krizman, Marian, Shook, Skoe, & Kruas, 2012)
As suggested by the enhanced ability of musicians to detect sounds in other languages, this relationship between language and music works both ways. In a study about the effect of music on language learning, Lowe (1995) took two groups of students who were learning French, and introduced music to the course of some of them. Sure enough, the students that had both music and language in their course of study performed better on both music tests and language tests that those who had only language study!
So, basically: Music and language use the same brain structures, especially when you are bilingual and frequently use or are exposed to a broad range of sounds and tones in spoken language. So, bilinguals are generally better at music, and musicians are generally better at language! If you are a TCK who learns languages easily and is good at music: congratulations, it is because your brain is physically different in that area due to your experiences.
References:
Lowe, A. S. (1995) The effect of the incorporation of music learning into the second language classroom on the mutual reinforcement of music and language. Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship. Retrieved from: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/19957
Krizman, J., Marian, V., Shook, A., Skoe, E., Kruas, N. (2012). Subcortical encoding of sound is enhanced in bilinguals and relates to executive function advantages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 109 no. 20, 7877-7881. Retreived from: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/20/7877.full