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...