Music Reading Expertise Facilitates English but not Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from Eye Movement Behaviour

Abstract

Background: Our previous studies showed that music reading expertise enhanced English word reading but not Chinese character reading (Li & Hsiao, 2018). This effect may be because music notation and English word reading both involve mapping horizontally arranged visual components to components in sound, in contrast to logographic Chinese reading.

Aims: Here we aim to extend our investigation to sentence reading through an eye-tracking study. We hypothesize that music reading expertise facilitates English but not Chinese reading.

Method: Chinese-English bilingual musicians and non-musicians with similar language proficiencies read English sentences, Chinese sentences, musical phrases, and sentences in Tibetan, a language novel to the participants, with eye tracking. English and Chinese stimuli consisted of three structural regularity conditions: syntactically and semantically correct, syntactically correct and semantically incorrect, and syntactically and semantically incorrect, whereas music and Tibetan stimuli consisted of syntactically correct and incorrect conditions. Participants then completed a sentence comprehension (for syntactically and semantically correct English/Chinese sentences) or a recognition task (for the other stimulus types) to test their comprehension/recognition abilities.

Results: We used the EMHMM (Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Models; Chuk, Chan & Hsiao, 2014; http://visal.cs.cityu.edu.hk/research/emhmm/) method to analyze eye movement data. This approach summarizes each participant’s eye movements in terms of person-specific regions of interests (ROIs) and transition probabilities among the ROIs using a hidden Markov model. Through clustering individual models, we discovered two common eye-movement patterns in music notation reading: top-focus pattern (fixating mainly at the top halves of the musical segments) and bottom-focus pattern. More musicians adopted the top-focus pattern, which may be related to information distribution of music notations. Interestingly, there were also significantly more musicians adopting a top-focus pattern in English reading, and this pattern was correlated with faster reading time and better comprehension in English reading. In addition, there were marginally more musicians adopting a top-focus pattern in Tibetan reading, and the top-focus pattern was correlated with longer fixation duration in reading syntactically incorrect Tibetan sentences. These effects were not observed in Chinese reading. These results suggested that the top-focus pattern resulting from music reading experience facilitates English reading and enhances sensitivity to structural regularities in Tibetan reading, but does not modulate Chinese reading. This phenomenon may be because music notations and English/Tibetan sentences (or alphabetic languages in general) have similar global forms and information distributions, and their reading rely on similar local component-by-component processing, in contrast to logographic Chinese reading.

Conclusions: These results suggest that the modulation of music reading expertise on text reading depends on the similarities in the cognitive processes involved. It also has important implications for the benefits of music education on language and cognitive development.