2 . It’s hard to say why, but it’s just true: music is good for you. It can calm your spirit and help you vent (发泄) your anger.     1     But there’s one surprising yet well-documented effect that has really surprised us. Music lessons are very good for language comprehension -- and they might even be better than reading lessons.

    2     But in this new study from MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology), researchers were able to see music lessons improve word comprehension right before their eyes. Led by Robert Desimone, the director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the team tested 74 children between the ages of four and five to see how their growing language skills were affected by piano lessons.

The 74 participants were divided into three groups.     3     The other two had their weekly academic lessons supplemented with three 45-minute lessons per week -- the first got piano lessons and the second took part in reading lessons.

The results? The ones who received a little extra learning every week outperformed those who just continued on with their normal studies.     4     Perhaps even more surprisingly, the children who took the music lessons even outperformed the ones who took the reading lessons when it came to telling the difference between two words that were very similar.

“That’s a big thing for kids in learning language: being able to hear the differences between words,” Desimone said in a statement. “They really benefited from that.” To the researchers, the results point to one clear conclusion:     5