The effect of musical training on verbal and tonal working memory

THE EFFECT OF MUSICAL TRAINING ON VERBAL AND TONALWORKING MEMORYby CHING-I LUAugust 2012Advisor: Dr. Margaret GreenwaldMajor: Communication Sciences and DisordersDegree: Doctor of Philosophy This dissertation explored the translation from print to sound of the tonal languageMandarin versus English versus musical notation in healthy volunteers. The performance ofmusicians and non-musicians was compared across a variety of reading tasks in an attempt to examine whether musical training can facilitate Mandarin tone or phonological processing. Theeffects of increasing working memory load on reading performance across tasks were alsoexamined. Results showed that increasing demands on working memory in visual recognition tasks significantly decreased performance accuracy for both musicians and non-musicians acrosstasks. Significant differences in accuracy rates were observed between musicians andnon-musicians. Although the tonal information in Mandarin is embedded in phonological information, the current study provided evidence that musicians are better able to extract thistonal information from print than are non-musicians, or to maintain it in working memory. Evenin the Mandarin homophone task, which requires phonological judgments of print, the musicians demonstrated superior performance. The current study provides evidence that musical trainingfacilitates phonological language processing.