Matching the two participant groups
A total of 102 participants were recruited in the study. Data collected from two of them were excluded from analysis due to device malfunction. The 100 remained participants (49 males, 51 females) came from diverse majors such as education, psychology, engineering, geography, pharmacy, mathematics, etc. Participants were allocated into a Silence group without music (25 males, 25 females) and a BGM group with preferred music while reading (24 males, 26 females). Mean age and standard deviation (SD, in parenthesis) in the Silence group was 22.2 (3.6) and 25.0 (4.2) in the BGM group. Twenty-three (23) participants in the BGM group and 19 in the Silence group had passed graded/qualification exams in music. The two groups were comparable (examined by two-tailed tests) in English ability as gauged by LexTale scores (t(98) = 0.419, 