Mandarin is a tonal language - the famous example being the word 'ma' which can mean mother or horse depending on its pitch. So might musical training translate better to Mandarin, than it would to English? "Yeah it's possible that influenced the results." Robert Desimone, a neuroscientist at the McGovern Institute at MIT. But he says other studies do back up the fact that music lessons benefit language learners, even in countries without tonal languages. "And what our study added on top of that was also some idea of the neural basis for those benefits." And if you don't own a piano, don't despair. The reading group actually did just as good on many measures as the piano group. "Reading's pretty good actually. We don't mean to downplay reading instruction." More important, he says, was to show piano wasn't actually worse than reading for these skills, perhaps encouraging cash-strapped schools to keep their music programs alive.