Background music's effect on reading comprehension is debatable. Hu and his colleagues (Hu et al., 2019) demonstrate that listening to the music of one's selection while reading may be good for keeping a pleasant mood and has no detrimental influence on reading performance. Their findings suggest that varied audio pieces have little effect on reading comprehension skills. Chew et al. (2016)also found that song familiarity and language have no statistically significant influence on reading comprehension but may alter word memory in language acquisition. However, Du et al. (2020) used ERPs to study how background music influences brain responses during reading comprehension and how musical arousal levels modulate them. Their findings support that, compared to a silent environment, the presence of background music made brain processing more challenging during reading comprehension. Thompson et al. (2012) claimed a similar conclusion in their study on the influence of background music in different tempos and intensities on reading comprehension tasks. Their results reveal that instrumental background music is most likely to disrupt reading comprehension when the music is fast and loud.
Except for instrumental and lyrical background music, a study on the effect of background white noise on memory performance was carried out by Söderlund et al. (2010). According to their results, background noise enhanced inattentive children's performance while deteriorating attentive children's performance, as well as eliminating episodic memory differences between attentive and inattentive school children. In Angwin et al. (2018, 2019), they tested the effects of white noise on direct and indirect semantic priming and new-word learning respectively. White noise significantly reduces the magnitude of indirect priming at each inter-stimulus interval. And for participants with lower executive and orienting attention, a reduction in indirect priming is found in noise relative to silence (Angwin et al., 2018). Moreover, with respect to new-word learning, the noise group shows a greater immediate identification accuracy for learned new word meanings than the no noise group, but this advantage was lost in the delayed recognition test. Therefore, it suggests that white noise has the capacity to facilitate meaning acquisition from context (Angwin et al., 2019).
Though immediate positive effects are found on inattentive school children and on the new word learning processes on the basis of previous studies, will the positive effects of white noise also be visible when dealing with reading comprehension tasks with complex syntactic structures? Moreover, will the language of songs be a factor which affects L2 learners' reading comprehension of complex syntactic structures? Therefore, we generate two general research questions. The first one is that can the different types of music including white noise affect L2 learners reading comprehension process of complex syntactic structures. The second question is whether the languages of background songs influence L2 reading of complex syntactic structures.
Reference
Angwin, A. J., Wilson, W. J., Copland, D. A., Barry, R. J., Myatt, G., & Arnott, W. L. (2018). The impact of auditory white noise on semantic priming. Brain and Language, 180–182, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2018.04.001
Angwin, A. J., Wilson, W. J., Ripollés, P., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Arnott, W. L., Barry, R. J., Cheng, B. B. Y., Garden, K., & Copland, D. A. (2019). White noise facilitates new-word learning from context. Brain and Language, 199, 104699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2019.104699
Chew, A. S.-Q., Yu, Y.-T., Chua, S.-W., & Gan, S. K.-E. (2016). The effects of familiarity and language of background music on working memory and language tasks in Singapore. Psychology of Music, 44(6), 1431–1438. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735616636209
Du, M., Jiang, J., Li, Z., Man, D., & Jiang, C. (2020). The effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 18651. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75623-3
Hu, X., Li, F., & Kong, R. (2019). Can Background Music Facilitate Learning?: Preliminary Results on Reading Comprehension. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, 101–105. https://doi.org/10.1145/3303772.3303839
Söderlund, G. B., Sikström, S., Loftesnes, J. M., & Sonuga-Barke, E. J. (2010). The effects of background white noise on memory performance in inattentive school children. Behavioral and Brain Functions, 6(1), 55. https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-9081-6-55
Thompson, W. F., Schellenberg, E. G., & Letnic, A. K. (2012). Fast and loud background music disrupts reading comprehension. Psychology of Music, 40(6), 700–708. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735611400173
