Read the following passage, which is excerpted from an Internet press release. Then decide whether each of the items that follows cites the passage acceptably in APA style or whether the citation may be considered plagiarism if included in another writer’s work. If the citation is acceptable, click “OK.” If the citation is plagiarized, click “Unacceptable.”

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ORIGINAL SOURCE

Music Instruction Aids Verbal Memory

Those dreaded piano lessons pay off in unexpected ways: According to a new study, children with music training had significantly better verbal memory than their counterparts without such training. Plus, the longer the training, the better the verbal memory. These findings underscore how, when experience changes a specific brain region, other skills that region supports may also benefit—a kind of cognitive side effect that could help people recovering from brain injury as well as healthy children. The research appears in the July issue of Neuropsychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Psychologists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong studied 90 boys between age six and 15. Half had musical training as members of their school’s string orchestra program, plus lessons in playing classical music on Western instruments, for one to five years. The other 45 participants were schoolmates with no musical training. The researchers, led by Agnes S. Chan, Ph.D., gave the children verbal memory tests, to see how many words they recalled from a list, and a comparable visual memory test for images.

Students with musical training recalled significantly more words than the untrained students, and they generally learned more words with each subsequent trial of three. After 30-minute delays, the trained boys also retained more words than the control group. There were no such differences for visual memory. What’s more, verbal learning performance rose in proportion to the duration of musical training.

Thus, the authors say, even fewer than six years of musical training can boost verbal memory. More training, they add, may be even better because of a “greater extent of cortical reorganization in the left temporal region.” In other words, the more that music training stimulates the left brain, the better that side can handle other assigned functions, such as verbal learning. It’s like cross training for the brain, comparable perhaps to how runners find that stronger legs help them play tennis better—even though they began wanting only to run. Similarly, says Chan, “Students with better verbal memory probably will find it easier to learn in school.”

This 2003 press release on the APA website describes the 2003 article “Music Training Improves Verbal but Not Visual Memory: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Explorations in Children” by Y.-C. Ho, M.-C. Cheung, and A. S. Chan, which appeared in Neuropsychology, 17(3), 439-450.

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