temporarily stores auditory units and combines them into a
single percept (such as a sound pattern, rhythm or melody).
Interestingly, there seems to be a high degree of overlap
between working memory for musical stimuli and for verbal
stimuli, as has been shown in recent working-memory
experiments [7]. This might be one of the reasons why
musicians tend to show a slightly superior verbal working
memory - at least in tonal languages such as Chinese [8,9].
Recently, Sluming et al. [10] found that in musicians,
compared with non-musicians, there is more gray matter in
the part of the frontal cortex known to accommodate neural
networks that are involved in several important working
memory processes. One might thus conclude that a kind of
positive transfer between musical performance and verbal
memory functions takes place; in other words, that the
process of learning music improves the learning of verbal
tasks (see Box 1 for definitions of technical terms used in
this article).