Reading Ability Dictated by Musical Aptitudes

Investigators at the Northwestern University provide the first biological basis for a long-suspected connection between a person's ability to read and their musical aptitudes and auditory working memory efficiency. This is the first time such an intricate connection is proven.

The auditory working memory represents the brain's capability to listen to new data, compile them, and then recall them while performing a task that requires the stored information. In other words, this ability is used to convert sounds into information that the brain can then store for later use.

Both this type of memory and attention are required in order to achieve high musical abilities. On the other hand, the latter is tightly connected to literacy and verbal memory in children. The Northwestern team shows that auditory working memory and musical aptitudes are related to reading ability,

Details of the new investigation appear in the latest issue of the open-access scientific journal Behavioral and Brain Functions, which is published by BioMed Central. The work was carried out by scientists with the Northwestern Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory (ANL).

During the study, a group of children was put through a battery of tests. One of them was for example designed to test how good the participants were with reading and recognizing words. Another sought to see how well the subjects remembered a sequence of numbers.

The researchers then played either rhythmic or random, speech-based sounds to the test group, and measured the electrical activity that was produced in their brains' auditory stems as a response to this.

“Both musical ability and literacy correlated with enhanced electrical signals within the auditory brainstem,” ANL researcher and study leader Dr. Nina Kraus explains.

“Structural equation modeling of the data revealed that music skill, together with how the nervous system responds to regularities in auditory input and auditory memory/attention accounts for about 40% of the difference in reading ability between children,” she adds

“These results add weight to the argument that music and reading are related via common neural and cognitive mechanisms and suggests a mechanism for the improvements in literacy seen with musical training,” the investigator goes on to say, quoted by Eurekalert.

One of the most remarkable discoveries was that the electrical response triggered in the auditory brainstems of children who could read poorly was of lower intensity when rhythmic sounds were played back than when they heard random noises.