Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.