The Association between Music Training, Background Music, and Adult Reading Comprehension.

IntroductionMusicians and music educators have long promoted the emotional and social benefits of musical experiences. These benefits include the teamwork and community effort promoted by performing in musical ensembles (Kokotsaki & Hallam, 2007), the soothing qualities of aesthetic experiences (Reimer, 2003) and the sense of accomplishment achieved in a successful performance (Bartolome, 2013), among many others. Recently, however, there has been increased interest in the potential cognitive benefits of music as well. Researchers have begun to investigate the effects of musical experiences and music training on brain structure and cognitive function in an attempt to determine the extent to which music can actually affect the way that we think (Rauscher & Hinton, 2011). Additional research is still needed, but it now seems possible that musical experiences and training can have significant, lasting effects on the structure and function of the brain.At the most basic level, music training appears to cause physiological changes in the structure of the brain. Researchers have shown that expert musicians tend to have more gray matter than nonmusicians, especially in the left hemisphere and in locations surrounding Broca's and Wernicke's areas (Schlaug, Jancke, Huang, & Steinmetz, 1995; Schneider et al., 2002). This increase in brain tissue may indicate increased cognitive function in specific areas of the brain. Researchers have suggested that music training can be linked to improved spatial (Hassler, Birbaumer, & Feil, 1985), mathematical (Vaughn, 2000), and verbal abilities (Chan, Ho, & Cheung, 1998; Franklin et al., 2008; Hansen, Wallentin, & Vuust, 2012). Although some authors have reported conflicting results (e.g. Brandler & Rammsayer, 2003; Helmbold, Rammsayer, & Altenmuller, 2005), the overall body of research seems to support the idea that music training does have measurable effects on specific areas of cognitive function (for a general survey of related literature, see Rauscher & Hinton, 2011). Although a few researchers have attempted to examine the effect of music on cognition in general terms (e.g. Schellenberg, 2004, 2006), many more have focused specifically on the connection between music and language. There are many facets to this connection, the first of which is structural. Music processing, even that related to motor skills, appears to recruit many of the same brain areas as language processing, including both Broca's and Wernicke's areas (Bangert et. al, 2006; see also Patel, 2008). This suggests that music and language tasks are processed by similar or at least related neural networks. In support of this theory, Patson and Tippett (2011) found that the ability of trained musicians to determine whether a sentence was grammatically correct was significantly impaired when music was played in the background. By contrast, playing music in the background had no effect on musicians' ability to complete visuospatial tasks, making it unlikely that the musicians' decreased scores on the language task were caused by simple attentional deficits. It appears, at least in expert musicians, that language processing and musical processing are closely linked in terms of brain function.Much of the research connecting music and language function in adults has been focused on discrete skills such as verbal retention and working memory. In one of the seminal studies in this area, Chan et al. (1998) demonstrated that adults with music training had increased verbal but not visual memory. This result has been corroborated by other researchers (Brandler & Rammsayer, 2003; Franklin et al., 2008; Hansen et al., 2012; Strait & Krauss, 2011). The literature does not uniformly support the conclusion of increased verbal function in adults with music training, however. In a replication and expansion of a study by Brandler and Rammsayer (2003), Helmbold, Rammsayer, and Altenmuller (2005) did not find significant increases in musicians' verbal memory or comprehension. …