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This study examined the neurophysiological effects of acoustic degradation on auditory semantic processing. Event-related potentials were recorded to target words presented in a sentence context. Targets were semantically congruent or incongruent with the context, which was acoustically intact or low-pass filtered. In unaltered contexts, N400 amplitude was significantly greater for incongruent than congruent words. Filtering significantly reduced this effect, even though participants were highly accurate in interpreting the degraded stimuli, as shown by an anomaly detection task. This reduction in the N400 effect appeared to be driven by decreased N400 amplitudes over posterior electrode sites for incongruent targets. These results demonstrate that acoustic degradation influences the neural response to words in context by reducing the availability of semantic information in on-line sentence comprehension.

Performing musicians invest thousands of hours becoming experts in a range of perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills. The duration and intensity of musicians' training -far greater than that of most educational or rehabilitation programs -provides a useful model to test the extent to which skills acquired in one particular context (music) generalize to different domains. Here, we asked whether the instrument-specific and more instrument-general skills acquired during professional violinists' and pianists' training would generalize to superior performance on a wide range of analogous (largely non-musical) skills, when compared to closely matched non-musicians.Violinists and pianists outperformed non-musicians on fine-grained auditory psychophysical measures, but surprisingly did not differ from each other, despite the different demands of their instruments. Musician groups did differ on a tuning system perception task: violinists showed clearest biases towards the tuning system specific to their instrument, suggesting that long-term experience leads to selective perceptual benefits given a training-relevant context. However, we found only weak evidence of group differences in non-musical skills, with musicians differing marginally in one measure of sustained auditory attention, but not significantly on auditory scene analysis or multi-modal sequencing measures. Further, regression analyses showed that this sustained auditory attention metric predicted more variance in one auditory psychophysical measure than did musical expertise. Our findings suggest that specific musical expertise may yield distinct perceptual outcomes within contexts close to the area of training. Generalization of expertise to relevant cognitive domains may be less clear, particularly where the task context is non-musical.Keywords: expertise; musicians; perception; cognition; generalization GENERALITY AND SPECIFICITY IN MUSICAL EXPERTISE EFFECTS 3 Highlights 1. We studied generalization of expertise to auditory perceptual and broader cognitive skills.2. Musician groups perceived auditory signal differences more finely than non-musicians.3. Musician groups differed in fine perception given a training-relevant context. 4. Musical expertise did not strongly generalize to several cognitive measures (e.g., auditory scene analysis).5. 5. Sustained attention predicted variance in fine perception of AM depth above expertise. GENERALITY AND SPECIFICITY IN MUSICAL EXPERTISE EFFECTS 4 Generality and Specificity in the Effects of Musical Expertise on Perception and CognitionPerceptual and cognitive skills can be shaped and enhanced through our experience with the world (e.g., Goldstone, 1999;Palmeri & Gauthier, 2004). Pursuit of expertise in a given domain is a particularly striking example: groups as diverse as chess masters, physicians, athletes and musicians spend thousands of hours training and practicing, honing perceptual, cognitive and motor skills critical to success in their field (see Ericsson, 2006;Palmeri et al., 2004; Chi, 200...

In a non-linguistic analog of the "cocktail-party" scenario, informational and contextual factors were found to affect the recognition of everyday environmental sounds embedded in naturalistic auditory scenes. Short environmental sound targets were presented in a dichotic background scene composed of either a single stereo background scene or a composite background scene created by playing different background scenes to the different ears. The side of presentation, time of onset, and number of target sounds were varied across trials to increase the uncertainty for the participant. Half the sounds were contextually congruent with the background sound (i.e., consistent with the meaningful real-world sound environment represented in the auditory scene) and half were incongruent. The presence of a single competing background scene decreased identification accuracy, suggesting an informational masking effect. In tandem, there was a contextual pop-out effect, with contextually incongruent sounds identified more accurately. However, when targets were incongruent with the real-world context of the background scene, informational masking was reduced. Acoustic analyses suggested that this contextual pop-out effect was driven by a mixture of perceptual differences between the target and background, as well as by higher-level cognitive factors. These findings indicate that identification of environmental sounds in naturalistic backgrounds is an active process that requires integrating perceptual, attentional, and cognitive resources.