Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.