AUTHOR=Putkinen Vesa , Huotilainen Minna , Tervaniemi Mari 

TITLE=Neural Encoding of Pitch Direction Is Enhanced in Musically Trained Children and Is Related to Reading Skills

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=10

YEAR=2019

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01475

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01475

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>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 (<italic>N</italic> = 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 (<italic>N</italic> = 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.</p>