Literature Review !!

Hello everyone..!!

Yo, welcome again to my blog. So, last week I have write an introduction about review this Journal and today I want to continue. If you forget about the Introduction, you can go HERE . So, the title is “Effect Music on Reading Comprehension” and this is a Literature Review. Let’s get start it !!

Literature Review. 

Music listening and music learning can lead to short-term and long term cognitive benefits (Schellenberg, 2005). Research conducted by Salame and Baddeley (1989) have also looked at the effects of music on short-term memory (STM). Participants were asked to recall a number sequence while listening to vocal or instrumental music. The results of the study showed that participants in the instrumental music condition were able to recall numbers more accurately than participants in the vocal music condition. The participants found the words in the vocal music condition distracting, however, participants didn’t find the instrumental music distracting. A number of studies have been conducted to investigate the relationship between music and learning. Leng and Shaw’s (1991) Mozart Effect study examined if music training in young children would act as an exercise for higher brain function, more precisely, spatial temporal reasoning. The results of this study, showed a long term enhancement in spatial temporal reasoning. From the results of the previous study, Rauscher and Shaw’s (1998), examined the idea that if music were to have a long term effect on spatial temporal reasoning, then maybe listening to music might have a short term enhancement. The study was conducted on college students, whereby the students listened to the first 10 minutes of Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448). The result of the study showed that those who listened to Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K.448) scored significantly higher on a spatial temporal reasoning task than after listening to other genres of music. Research by Schellenberg (2004) examined the use of music lessons to increase general intelligence. The study used two types of music lessons (piano and voice) and two control groups (drama lessons and no lessons). Participants were assigned to one of four groups and administered the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children Third Edition (WISC-III) before and after their group condition. Results of the study found that the combined music groups had an improvement in IQ when compared with those in the drama and no lessons group. A number of studies tend to focus on the detrimental effects which music can have on cognitive task, however research conducted by Savage (2001), has found that listening comprehension and reading comprehension involve similar cognitive processes, suggesting they are not competing stimuli, which indicates that music could be used to further enhance educational task.

Background Noise.

Oswald, Tremblay, and Jones (2000) examined the disruption in comprehension scores by the meaning of irrelevant sound, by using meaningful and meaningless speech. The study found that both meaningful and meaningless irrelevant material disrupted the reading comprehension task, however there was a greater disruption caused by meaningful irrelevant speech. Until there is further investigation into comprehension and cognitive task, the findings of the study suggest that silence appears to be the optimal working environment. Dobbs, Furnham and McClelland (2011) conducted a study to examine if background noise would be as distracting as music on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extroverts. One hundred and eighteen female secondary school students participated in the study to undergo three cognitive tests, in the presence of music, noise and silence. The results of the study found that introverts performed worse on cognitive tasks than extroverts in the presence of music and noise, however in a silent environment, the performance of introverts and extroverts was the same. Research conducted by Banbury and Berry (1998) examined the effects of office noise (with and without speech) on recall memory and mental arithmetic. The results of the study found that during mental arithmetic and recall, the task performance of participants significantly declined in the presence of background office noise compared to silence conditions. Similarly, Broadbent (1958) examined the effects which noise has on complex mental tasks. The findings of the study showed that noise conditions, in comparison to silent conditions, deteriorated the performance of participants over time.

Music and Lyrics.

Besson at al (1998) conducted a study to address whether people listening to a song treat the linguistics and musical components separately, or do they integrate them with one single percept. The study involved recording event related potentials (ERP’s) of participants. Musicians were asked to listen to excerpts from operas sung a cappella (solo singing without instrumental sound) and excerpts of music, where the participants were asked to pay equal attention to the language and the music in order to find semantic and harmonic clashes. The results of the study showed evidence of the music and lyrics independent on-line processing when the semantic and harmonic features are taken into account. As is the case for so many other cognitive skills, the exquisite unity of vocal music emerges from the concerted activity of separate processors (Risset, 1991). Pool, van der Voort, Beentjes, and Koolstra (2000) conducted a study which found that a Dutch-speaking television program inhibited eighth grade students’ performance on a written task. However English-speaking music videos did not cause distraction among the students. This could suggest that the use of lyrics, in a foreign language within a song, could increase the complexity of the music, causing further detrimental effects to a cognitive task. The musical complexity theory mentioned by Furnham and Strbac (2002) states that although music has led to increased test scores, increased complexity within music will lead to a decrease in test scores among participant test scores, in comparison to less complex music. Research by Furnham & Bradley (1997) has been conducted on complexity contained music without lyrics. Although lyrics can add to the complexity within music, which in turn can add to the information load to be processed by the brain, a study by Banbury and Berry (1998) found that background noise combined with words had a detrimental effect on memory, whereas background noise without words did not have any notable effects.

All right, so that’s all about the Literature Review of this journal. Wanna to see another post? Just wait here and stay tune. Byee !!

Check another post too !!

Review Journal 2 – Effect Music on Reading Comprehension – Introduction.