When music tells a story: children's language and socioemotional development through music-supported narrative learning.

BACKGROUND

The WHO Regional Office for Europe has increasingly recognized the potential value of arts and music participation for children's health, well-being, and development. However, how music supports children's learning when integrated with narrative activities remains insufficiently understood.

OBJECTIVE

This review examined the practice structures, language-narrative and socioemotional outcomes, and learner- and design-related conditions associated with music-supported narrative learning for children aged 3-12 years.

METHODS

Following PRISMA 2020, Scopus, Web of Science, and ERIC were searched for English-language original empirical studies published from January 2016 to August 2026. Nineteen studies were included. Inductive thematic synthesis, outcome-oriented narrative synthesis, and cross-study explanatory synthesis were used. Quantitative and qualitative evidence were synthesized separately before integration, and cross-study relationships were interpreted as patterns of co-occurrence.

RESULTS

Practices included auditory enhancement of predefined narratives, sung or rhythmized text, embodied and multimodal activities, and generative music-narrative creation. Language-narrative findings were heterogeneous. More favorable outcomes were reported in some studies when music was functionally aligned with target language or narrative content, but this pattern was inconsistent. Socioemotional evidence more often concerned expressive, participatory, and relational affordances, especially in generative and collaborative practices.

CONCLUSION

This review integrates language-narrative and socioemotional evidence within a common framework and identifies two emerging patterns-information organization and expression-relationship-shifting attention from whether music works to which musical functions and participation structures relate to particular outcomes, although these patterns require further validation.