The impact of music training on temporal order processing in Mandarin Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs)

The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of music training on the processing of temporal order in Mandarin sentence reading using event-related potentials (ERPs). Two-clause sentences with temporal connectives ("before" or "after") were presented to both musicians and non-musicians. Additionally, a verbal N-back task was utilized to evaluate the participants' working memory capacities. The findings revealed that musicians, but not nonmusicians, demonstrated a more negative amplitude in the second clauses of "before" sentences compared with "after" sentences. In the N-back task, musicians exhibited faster reaction times than nonmusicians in the two-back condition. Furthermore, a correlation was observed between the ERP amplitude differences (before vs. after) and reaction time differences in the N-back task (0-back vs. 2-back) among musicians. These findings suggested that music training enhances the depth of temporal order processing, potentially mediated by improvements in working memory capacity.