Music reading experience modulates eye movement pattern in English reading but not in Chinese reading

Abstract

Here we tested the hypothesis that in Chinese-English bilinguals, music reading experience may modulate eye movement planning in reading English but not Chinese sentences due to the similarity in perceptual demands on processing sequential symbol strings separated by spaces between music notation and English sentence reading. Chinese-English bilingual musicians and non-musicians read legal, semantically incorrect, and syntactically (and semantically) incorrect sentences in both English and Chinese. In English reading, musicians showed more dispersed eye movement patterns in reading syntactically incorrect sentences than legal sentences, whereas non-musicians did not. This effect was not observed in Chinese reading. Musicians also had shorter saccade lengths when viewing syntactically incorrect than correct musical notations and sentences in an unfamiliar alphabetic language (Tibetan), whereas non-musicians did not. Thus, musicians' eye movement planning was disturbed by syntactic violations in both music and English reading but not in Chinese reading, and this effect was generalized to an unfamiliar alphabetic language. These results suggested that music reading experience may modulate perceptual processes in reading differentially in bilinguals' two languages, depending on their processing similarities.

Figure 1

(a) Upper left are sample English stimuli; upper right are sample Chinese stimuli; lower left are sample musical stimuli; lower right are sample Tibetan stimuli. (b) Procedure of the English/Chinese reading task. (c) Procedure of the musical phrase/ Tibetan sentence viewing task.

Figure 2

Results for English reading: (a) Reading time. (b) Average saccade length. (c) Two representative eye movement patterns discovered using EMHMM. Ellipses show ROIs as 2-D Gaussian emissions; the border of the ellipses show two standard deviations from the mean. The table shows transition probabilities among the ROIs. Priors show the probabilities that a fixation sequence starts from the ellipse. The smaller images show the assignment of actual fixations to different ROIs and the corresponding heatmap. The assignment of fixations to the ROIs was based on the ROI sequence with the largest posterior probability given the fixation sequence. (d) Eye movement pattern measured in D-S scale (***p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05).

Figure 3

Results of Chinese reading: (a) Reading time. (b) Average saccade length. (c) Two common patterns discovered using EMHMM. (d) Eye movement pattern measured in D-S scale (***p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05).

Figure 4

Results of the musical phrase viewing task: (a) Viewing time. (b) Average saccade length. (c) Two common patterns discovered using EMHMM. (d) Eye movement pattern measured in D-S scale (***p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05).

Figure 5

Results of Tibetan stimuli: (a) Viewing time. (b) Average saccade length. (c) Two common patterns discovered using EMHMM. (d) Eye movement pattern measured in D-S scale (***p < .001, **p < .01, *p < .05).