MUSICOPHILIA AND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Sauntering about town, watching traffic jams, skirting bicycles and skateboarders on sidewalks, I often catch myself humming. Waiting for a traffic light to change, fellow pedestrians pull their eyes away from their cell phone screens and stare at me as a weirdo. Someone humming a tune in public is suspect nowadays. But I digress.

The lowdown about this humming business is that the tunes that come to my mind while strolling are usually jingles and bits of children’s songs that my grandfather and my mother sang to me at the onset of my life. Often, I cannot recall from whom, or even when, I heard those songs that clutter my mind, but they are there, ready to pop up and bring a smile to my otherwise sullen face. Oliver Sacks refers to this phenomenon as “Musical hallucinations” in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Now I know the great benefits of putting music and words together. Children’s songs have catchy music to them, and simple, sometimes nonsensical, lyrics that get glued to our brains and stay there for years. Children do not make an effort to learn them. They just listen, enjoy and learn. That simple.

As habits are changing, parents seem to spend less time with their offspring. Some grandparents are taking over, but still, they do not invest time with their grandchildren as they used to. We do not seem to realize that kids need time with parents and grandparents, but parents and grandparents also need time with their children. Notice the recurrent words: parents, grandparents, children, kids… Ponder on this.

To preserve the lore handed down from generation to generation in your family and in order to offer your child the gift of another language, sing along with them in Spanish. You will be sharing emotions, feelings, and memories in the songs and lyrics of your childhood.

Not all is lost. Internet offers the possibility to relive children’s songs from all over the world… at our fingertips. Give it a try and sing along with your child and recapture the solace and benefits of song sharing with your kids.