Music reading expertise modulates word and text reading

Abstract

Music notation and English word reading both involve mapping horizontally arranged visual components to components in sound, in contrast to reading in logographic languages such as Chinese. Accordingly, music-reading expertise may influence English word processing more than Chinese character processing. Here in Study 1, we showed that musicians named English words significantly faster than non-musicians when words were presented in the left visual field/right hemisphere (RH) or the center position, suggesting an advantage of RH processing due to music reading experience. This effect was not observed in Chinese character naming. In Study 2, a follow-up ERP study showed that in a sequential matching task, musicians had reduced RH N170 responses to English non-words under the processing of musical segments as compared with non-musicians, suggesting a shared visual processing mechanism in the RH between music notation and English non-word reading. This shared mechanism may be related to the letter-by-letter, serial visual processing that characterizes RH English word recognition (e.g., Lavidor & Ellis, 2001), which may consequently facilitate English word processing in the RH in musicians. We further explored the modulation effect in visual spans of reading in Study 3. Musicians showed a larger visual span in the right visual field (RVF) in music note and English letter reading, but not in Chinese character reading, suggesting that musicians translated the processing advantage from left-to-right reading of music notation in the RVF through perpetual learning to better English reading performance in the RVF. Music reading expertise also enlarges the visual span in novel symbol (i.e., Tibetan) reading, suggesting that music reading expertise can be generalized to novel symbol reading. In Study 4, we extended our scope of investigation from letter/word processing to syntactic processing. Music notation and text reading both involve statistical learning of music or linguistic structures. Here we showed that musicians had a longer reading time and had marginally more fixations when reading syntactically incorrect novel (i.e., Tibetan) sentences than syntactically correct sentences. This result suggested that music reading expertise enhanced structural regularity processing in sentences in a novel language. Musicians transferred their statistical learning skills that stem from music reading experience to implicitly discover structural regularities in sentences. In addition, a follow-up Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models (EMHMM) showed that musicians had developed a top-focus fixation bias in music notation reading, and this fixation bias was transferred to English word reading and marginally to novel word (i.e., Tibetan) reading, but not to Chinese word reading, suggesting that musicians may acquire local processing skills of locating informative structures in music reading and are able to transfer this skill to other languages with similar global forms and information distributions, further enhancing English sentence reading performance. In short, music reading experience has differential influences on the processing of different languages, depending on their similarities in the cognitive processes involved.