Separate lines of research have identified enhanced performance
on nonverbal executive control (EC) tasks for bilinguals and those
with music training, but little is known about the relation between
them in terms of the specificity of the effects of each experience or
the degree of exposure necessary to induce these changes. Using an
intervention design, the current study pseudorandomly assigned
57 4- to 6-year-old children (matched on age, maternal education,
and cognitive scores) to a 20-day training program offering instruction
in either music or conversational French. The test battery consisted
of verbal and nonverbal tasks requiring EC. All children
improved on these tasks following training with some trainingspecific
differences. No changes were observed on background or
working memory measures after either training, ruling out simple
practice effects. Children in both groups had better scores on the
most challenging condition of a grammaticality sentence judgment
task in which it was necessary to ignore conflict introduced
through misleading semantic content. Children in both training
groups also showed better accuracy on the easier condition of a
nonverbal visual search task at post-test, but children in the
French training group also showed significant improvement on
the more challenging condition of this task. These results are discussed
in terms of emergent EC benefits of language and music
training.