Abstract

Music education is associated with increased speech perception abilities and anecdotal evidence suggests musical training is also beneficial for performance in a variety of academic areas. In spite of this positive association, very little empirical evidence exists to support this claim except for a few studies linking musical training to improvements in verbal tasks. We evaluated the relationships between specific aspects of musical training/ability and scores on a series of standardized reading assessments in a sample of twins. There was a significant and positive relationship between self-reported sight-reading ability for sheet music and performance on passage comprehension – a standardized reading measure that relies on decoding and working memory. This effect was specific to sight reading ability, as other musical variables, such as number of years of practice or music theory, were not related to performance on this reading measure. Surprisingly, the verbal working memory ability we tested did not mediate this relationship. To determine whether there is a genetic component to these skills, we compared these relationships in pairs of monozygotic twins compared to dizygotic twins. Interestingly, intraclass correlations (ICCs) for sight reading and passage comprehension were both higher in monozygotic twins compared to dizygotic twins, though this effect was larger for passage comprehension than for sight reading. These results together suggest a familial and potentially partially shared inherited mechanism for success in both musical sight-reading ability and passage comprehension.

Highlights

  • The link between musical training and academic performance is not clearly understood, despite decades of research

  • To determine whether musical training influences aspects of reading performance, we evaluated the relationships between several aspects of musicianship with a number of reading measures

  • We evaluated the relationship between various aspects of musical training and reading skills in a sample of adolescent twins

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Summary

Introduction

The link between musical training and academic performance is not clearly understood, despite decades of research. Children who received musical training before the age of 15 years exhibit better verbal memory compared to those without musical instruction (Chan et al, 1998; Ho et al, 2003). In addition to verbal memory improvements, the length of musical training predicted reading comprehension in 6- to 9-year-old typically developing readers (Corrigall and Trainor, 2011). This result persisted despite controlling for variables such as age, socioeconomic status (SES), auditory perception, IQ, number of hours spent reading per week, and word decoding skills

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