Recent research has shown that expertise in English and music reading both rely more on left hemisphere (LH) processing whereas Chinese character processing is more bilateral. Accordingly, music-reading expertise may influence hemispheric lateralization in English word processing more than in Chinese processing due to stronger competition in LH processing. Here we recruited musicians and non-musicians in a divided visual field study of English word and Chinese character naming. In English word processing, whereas non-musicians showed a typical right visual field (RVF)/LH advantage, musicians showed a left visual field (LVF)/right hemisphere (RH) advantage and responded significantly faster than nonmusicians in both the LVF and the center position. This effect may be due to competition for LH processing between music and English reading expertise, making musicians’ English word processing more right-lateralized. In contrast, in Chinese character naming, both musicians and non-musicians showed a similar bilateral pattern. This result suggests that music reading experience may have differential influences on the processing of different languages, depending on their similarities in the cognitive processes involved

Here we investigated how music reading experience modu-lates visual spans in language reading. Participants wereasked to identify music notes, English letters, Chinese charac-ters, and novel symbols (Tibetan letters) presented at randomlocations on the screen while maintaining central fixation. Wefound that for music note reading, musicians outperformednon-musicians at some peripheral positions in both visualfields, and for English letter reading, musicians outperformednon-musicians at some peripheral positions in the RVF butnot in the LVF. In contrast, in both Chinese character andnovel symbol reading, musicians and non-musicians did notdiffer in their performance at peripheral positions. Since bothmusic and English reading involve a left-to-right reading di-rection and a RVF/LH advantage, these results suggest thatthe modulation of music reading experience on visual spans inlanguage reading depends on the similarities in the cognitiveprocesses involved.