The aim of this study was to analyse whether specialised musical training influences auditory discrimination, working memory, learning strategies and academic performance. Sixty students (30 with at least four years of musical training and 30 without) of the same socioeconomic level were compared. Significant differences were found between students with and without musical training in terms of learning strategies, working memory and academic performance (p= <.05). This study shows the benefits of musical training offered at specialised centres, the development of students’ cognitive skills and the contributions of neuroscience to improving professional practice.

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) present prosodic impairments. They are also interested in musical activities. In typical development, a body of research has shown that the linguistic prosodic skills of musically trained individuals are enhanced. However, it is not known whether, in WS, musical training is also associated with enhanced prosodic performance, a question this study sought to answer. We compared the performance on linguistic prosodic tasks among seven musically trained and fourteen musically untrained individuals with WS, and typically developing peers. Among those with WS, musically trained participants outperformed their musically untrained counterparts on the perception of acoustic parameters involved in prosody, the understanding of questioning and declarative intonation, and the comprehension of prefinal contrastive stress. The results suggest that musical training facilitates prosodic performance in WS. Our findings also suggest common processing mechanisms for acoustic parameters involved in both prosody and music, and that positive music-to-language transfer effects could take place in WS. We discuss the implications of these results for intervention purposes.