ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2021
Music is similar to language in terms of working memory interference.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Functional Neural Architecture of Working Memory in Musicians: An ALE Meta-Analysis and Review.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive sciencePooled it
- How musical rhythm training improves short-term memory for faces.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Trial
- Evaluating the compatibility of predictive coding as a model of linguistic predictability effects in reading.Frontiers in cognition · 2026Review
- Different effects of verbal and visual working memory loads on Language prediction.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Music and Language in Williams Syndrome: An Integrative and Systematic Mini-Review.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Never too late to start musical instrument training: Effects on working memory and subcortical preservation in healthy older adults across 4 years.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Music interventions in 132 healthy older adults enhance cerebellar grey matter and auditory working memory, despite general brain atrophy.Neuroimage. Reports · 2023Article
- What Makes a Foreign Language Intelligible? An Examination of the Impact of Musical Ability and Individual Differences on Language Perception and How Intelligible Foreign Languages Appear.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Article
- The effect of practice and musical structure on pianists' eye-hand span and visual monitoring.Journal of eye movement research · 2023Article
- Effects of a 10-week musical instrument training on cognitive function in healthy older adults: implications for desirable tests and period of training.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Some researchers theorize that musicians' greater language ability is mediated by greater working memory because music and language share the same processing resources. Prior work using working memory sentence processing dual-task paradigms have shown that holding verbal information (e.g., words) in working memory interferes with sentence processing. In contrast, visuospatial stimuli are processed in a different working memory store and should not interfere with sentence processing. We tested whether music showed similar interference to sentence processing as opposed to noninterference like visuospatial stimuli. We also compared musicians to nonmusicians to investigate whether musical training improves verbal working memory. Findings revealed that musical stimuli produced similar working memory interference as linguistic stimuli, but visuospatial stimuli did not-suggesting that music and language rely on similar working memory resources (i.e., verbal skills) that are distinct from visuospatial skills. Musicians performed more accurately on the working memory tasks, particularly for the verbal and musical working memory stimuli, supporting an association between musicianship and greater verbal working memory capacity. Future research is necessary to evaluate the role of music training as a cognitive intervention or educational strategy to enhance reading fluency.
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