Music notation and English word reading have similar visualprocessing requirements. It remains unclear how the twoskills influence each other. Here we investigated the modula-tion of music reading expertise on visual processing of Eng-lish words through an ERP study. Participants matched Eng-lish real, pseudo, and non-words preceded by musical seg-ments or novel symbol strings in a sequential matching task.Musicians showed smaller N170 amplitude in response toEnglish non-words preceded by musical segments than bynovel symbol strings in the right hemisphere. This effect wasnot observed in real or pseudo-words, or in any of non-musicians’ responses. Similar to English non-words, musicalsegments do not have morphological rules or semantic infor-mation, giving rise to this modulation effect. This findingsuggested a shared visual processing mechanism in the righthemisphere between music notation and English non-wordreading, which may be related to serial symbol processing assuggested by previous studies.