Music-reading expertise modulates the visual span for English letters but not Chinese characters

Music reading experience modulates eye movement pattern in English reading but not in Chinese reading

Here we tested the hypothesis that in Chinese-English bilinguals, music reading experience may modulate eye movement planning in reading English but not Chinese sentences due to the similarity in perceptual demands on processing sequential symbol strings separated by spaces between music notation and English sentence reading. Chinese–English bilingual musicians and non-musicians read legal, semantically incorrect, and syntactically (and semantically) incorrect sentences in both English and Chinese. In English reading, musicians showed more dispersed eye movement patterns in reading syntactically incorrect sentences than legal sentences, whereas non-musicians did not. This effect was not observed in Chinese reading. Musicians also had shorter saccade lengths when viewing syntactically incorrect than correct musical notations and sentences in an unfamiliar alphabetic language (Tibetan), whereas non-musicians did not. Thus, musicians’ eye movement planning was disturbed by syntactic violations in both music and English reading but not in Chinese reading, and this effect was generalized to an unfamiliar alphabetic language. These results suggested that music reading experience may modulate perceptual processes in reading differentially in bilinguals’ two languages, depending on their processing similarities.

Music-reading expertise associates with face but not Chinese character processing ability

A growing number of behavioural and neuroimaging studies have investigated the cognitive mechanisms and neural substrates underlying various forms of visual expertise, such as face and word processing. However, it remains poorly understood whether and to what extent the acquisition of one form of expertise would be associated with that of another. The current study examined the relationship between music-reading expertise and face and Chinese character processing abilities. In a series of experiments, music experts and novices performed discrimination and recognition tasks of musical notations, faces, and words. Results consistently showed that musical experts responded more accurately to musical notations and faces, but not to words, than did musical novices. More intriguingly, the music expert's age of training onset could well predict their face but not word processing performance: the earlier musical experts began musical notation reading, the better their face processing performance. Taken together, our findings provide preliminary and converging evidence that music-reading expertise links with face, but not word, processing, and lend support to the notion that the development of different types of visual expertise may not be independent, but rather interact with each other during their acquisition.

Domain-specific and domain-general contributions to reading musical notation

Musical practice may benefit not only domain-specific abilities, such as pitch discrimination and music performance, but also domain-general abilities, like executive functioning and memory. Behavioral and neural changes in visual processing have been associated with music-reading experience. However, it is still unclear whether there is a domain-specific visual ability to process musical notation. This study investigates the specificity of the visual skills relevant to simple decisions about musical notation. Ninety-six participants varying in music-reading experience answered a short survey to quantify experience with musical notation and completed a test battery that assessed musical notation reading fluency and accuracy at the level of individual note or note sequence. To characterize how this ability may relate to domain-general abilities, we also estimated general intelligence (as measured with the Raven's Progressive Matrices) and general object-recognition ability (as measure by a recently proposed construct o). We obtained reliable measurements on our various tasks and found evidence for a domain-specific ability of the perception of musical notation. This music-reading ability and domain-general abilities were found to contribute to performance on specific tasks differently, depending on the level of experience reading music.