Do people’s musical preferences impact the effect of music on their reading comprehension?

Abstract

Prior studies have found that arousal after listening to music can affect results on a cognitive task, so the present paper proposes a study to investigate how listening to one’s favorite music and the music that one doesn’t like affects arousal, and how this will consequently impact performance on reading tasks. Additionally, most studies on music and cognition are conducted in English-speaking samples, so our study will also contribute to the literature by using a Vietnamese-speaking sample. Specifically, this study asks: Does people’s musical preference impact the effect of music on their reading comprehension? We will conduct an experiment with a sample of 50 Vietnamese high-schoolers comparing the performance in reading tasks of two groups: one that listens to their favorite music and one that listens to disliked music. We hypothesize that listening to preferred music will lead to increased arousal compared to non-preferred music, which will in turn lead to increased scores on the reading comprehension task. This study will improve our understanding of how the effect of music on people’s reading comprehension varies based on musical preference.