The Impact of Music on Verbal Memory: Evidence from Jordanian University Students

Purpose. Following the hypothesis of shared cognitive mechanisms between language and music, the present study investigates the interconnection between musical orientation and language processing operations in Broca’s area, namely verbal retrieval. The researchers replicated Taylor & Dewhurst’s (2017) study by applying a perceptual task of four types of words in Arabic to Jordanian university students spanning a wide range of musical orientations. Methods. The participants are musicians with different levels of musical training and non-musicians who vary in their musical interests. A T-test was applied to the results of musicians and non-musicians. Furthermore, a Kruskal-Wallis test was carried out to reveal significant differences within groups. Moreover, paired comparisons were conducted to find out significant differences between the four word types regardless of the participants’ musical background. Results. First, verbal memory was enhanced by musical training where musicians, despite their level of musical training, scored significantly better than non-musicians in the verbal recall test. Second, the level of musical training contributes to improving the ability to recall different types of words where advanced musicians scored higher than intermediates and beginners. Third, non-musicians who spend more time than others listening to music daily scored better in the given perceptual task than those who spend less time listening to music or do not listen to music at all. Finally, visual words appeared to be the easiest to recall since they are high in imagery. In contrast, abstract words are the hardest to recall given that they only have non-sensory features, unlike concrete words, such as visual, auditory and tactile words. Conclusions. This study supports the hypothesis of music impact on the retrieval process of words. Higher exposure to musical training or music in general leads to better word retrieval. However, word type can be a factor that might affect the retrieval process since certain word types are easier to recall than others.