Psychology Critique

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This paper is my first assignment for Physiological Psychology. The first section of this paper critiques an article entitled Music Enrichment Programs Improve the Neural Encoding of Speech in At Risk Children. This section is a critique on the article written by Nina Kraus, Jessica Slater, Elaine C. Thompson, Jane Hornickel, Dana L.Strait, Trent Nicol, and Travis White-Schwoch. For this paper I need to analyze and criticize the author’s methods, their results, whether or not this research is valuable, the strength’s and the weaknesses of this study and if the results of this study support the hypotheses. The second part of this paper is another critique on a similar article entitled Short-Term Music training Enhances Verbal Intelligence and…show more content…
There were 44 children in total used in this study. There were 25 girls and 19 boys used for this experiment. All of the children were selected randomly by a program designed in collaboration with Harmony Project. The children were separated into two groups. Group 1 studied music for only one year and Group 2 studied for two years. Both groups had one hour session, twice a week. Each session taught fundamental skills such as pitch, rhythmic identification, etc. Every July for the next three years all the participants were given test that were administered using intelligent Hearing system’s SmartEP platform. They used click and speech-evoked auditory brainstem responses. They used two different voiced constants-vowel, ga and ba, which were delivered to the right ear using headphones. They also used a Cross-phraseogram procedure which was used to qualify the responds timing between the two…show more content…
However this was not the same for the children in the Group 1 who only had one year of music training. In the graph that they provided showed that both group at the start of this study both groups had fairly similar neurophysiological distinction. In the first year of their music training group 2 showed a higher neurophysiological distinction than Group 1 did. The third and the last year it once again showed that group 2 was able to once again be able to different between Ga and Ba .In the Cross-phraseogram plot shows more brain activity in group 2 than in group 1 in almost all the tests. The test and the plots showed that over all group 1 didn’t show that much over the span of the three years. Their neurophysiological distinction between the constants-vowels did not drastically progress like the plots for Group 1. The children in group 1 ‘s test results stayed fairly constant compares to the children who had music training for two years( Group 2). The results showed that the longer a child has some sort of music training the more that child is able to pick up and encode of speech. The more hours a child is training in music the more that child is able to encode speech and neurophysiological improvement. I think the results do

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