Abstract
Musical training in childhood has been linked to enhanced sound encoding at different stages of the auditory processing. In the current study, we used auditory event-related potentials to investigate cortical sound processing in 9- to 15-year-old children (N = 88) with and without musical training. Specifically, we recorded the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a responses in an oddball paradigm consisting of standard tone pairs with ascending pitch and deviant tone pairs with descending pitch. A subsample of the children (N = 44) also completed a standardized test of reading ability. The musically trained children showed a larger P3a response to the deviant sound pairs. Furthermore, the amplitude of the P3a correlated with a pseudo-word reading test score. These results corroborate previous findings on enhanced sound encoding in musically trained children and are in line with studies suggesting that neural discrimination of spectrotemporal sound patterns is predictive of reading ability.
Highlights
A vast number of event-related potential (ERP) studies have found evidence for enhanced neural sound processing in musicians
The deviant tone pairs elicited a two-peaked negative response, the latter of which was interpreted as the mismatch negativity (MMN) based on its latency and was chosen for further analysis (Figure 1B)
The current study investigated whether musically trained children show facilitated preattentive neural discrimination of pitch order in tone pairs as indexed by the MMN and the P3a
Summary
A vast number of event-related potential (ERP) studies have found evidence for enhanced neural sound processing in musicians. The MMN is elicited by infrequent “deviant” sounds that differ from the preceding frequent “standard” sounds in some way (Kujala et al, 2007; Näätänen et al, 2007). According to influential theoretical accounts, the MMN is a cortical correlate of a prediction error that occurs when an incoming sound (the deviant) disconfirms predictions that the auditory system has automatically created on the basis of the preceding input (the standards) (Näätänen et al, 2007; Winkler et al, 2009). Cross-sectional MMN studies indicate that musically trained children show enhanced neural discrimination of pitch of violin tones (i.e., their main instrument; Meyer et al, 2011)
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