Abstract
Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are known to have poor verbal faculties, and numerous studies have shown impaired verbal short-term memory (STM). In this study, we examine whether long-term training in music can enhance the digit span of verbal STM among individuals with DS. Four musically trained and four untrained individuals with DS and eight typically developed (TD) persons participated in the experiment, where they were asked to recite digit strings (from 2 to 5 digits) that were uttered by a vocaloid, i.e. a vocal synthesizer, and the number of trials they could recall correctly was scored. TD participants could recall almost all digit strings correctly. The musically trained DS (MDS) group has significantly higher score from the 2-digits to 4-digits string test than the untrained DS (UDS) group. The results show that long-term music training can enhance the verbal STM of individuals with DS.
