Voice Instruction Enhances Childrenʹs Spatial Ability: Tonal (Thai) Speaker Case Study

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of individual music instruction featuring the singing on the spatial reasoning of the tonal (Thai) speaker children. Thirty Thai children were equally assigned to one of two conditions, singing (N=15) or no music (N=15). Children in the music group received weekly individual instruction at their private music programs for a period of 3 months. All children were pretested and posttested with two spatial tasks: Mechanical Aptitude and Spatial Relations Sub-tests including Matching Part and Figures (MPF) and Spatial Views (SV). Means and standard deviations scores of music group were significantly higher than no music group in both tasks after 3 months of lessons (Music group, MPF, Mean = 8.33 (±.62) and SV, Mean = 9.33 (±.72); No music group, MPF, Mean = 5.07 (±1.34), SV, Mean = 6.40 (±1.84), respectively. The posttest scores of the music group was significantly greater than those of the no music group in both tasks (MPF, t(14) = -8.009, p < .0001; SV, t(14) = -5.12, p < .0001), respectively. The improvement for the no music group was presumably due to maturation. This study suggests that learning music is an important developmental activity in tonal (Thai) speaker children’s spatial ability. Neurophysiological basis of this finding is however needed to explore changes in the structure and function of the tonal (Thai) speaker children’s brain in relation to the neural circuitry involved in judging spatial skills.