Faster Sound Stream Segmentation in Musicians than in Nonmusicians

Abstract

The musician's brain is considered as a good model of brain plasticity as musical training is known to modify auditory perception and related cortical organization. Here, we show that music-related modifications can also extend beyond motor and auditory processing and generalize (transfer) to speech processing. Previous studies have shown that adults and newborns can segment a continuous stream of linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli based only on probabilities of occurrence between adjacent syllables, tones or timbres. The paradigm classically used in these studies consists of a passive exposure phase followed by a testing phase. By using both behavioural and electrophysiological measures, we recently showed that adult musicians and musically trained children outperform nonmusicians in the test following brief exposure to an artificial sung language. However, the behavioural test does not allow for studying the learning process per se but rather the result of the learning. In the present study, we analyze the electrophysiological learning curves that are the ongoing brain dynamics recorded as the learning is taking place. While musicians show an inverted U shaped learning curve, nonmusicians show a linear learning curve. Analyses of Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) allow for a greater understanding of how and when musical training can improve speech segmentation. These results bring evidence of enhanced neural sensitivity to statistical regularities in musicians and support the hypothesis of positive transfer of training effect from music to sound stream segmentation in general.

Interaction features for prediction of perceptual segmentation: Effects of musicianship and experimental task

“…This effect of musicianship on speed of detecting and indicating segment boundaries is partly not surprising because musicians are explicitly trained to follow musical cues that trigger their entrance during performances; however this result still suggests that non-musicians process perceived musical structure at a slower rate than musicians. In this line, effects of musical training on auditory working memory have been previously shown, since faster ability to capture the statistical structure of perceived streams (François, Jaillet, Takerkart, & Schön, 2014) and larger auditory memory spans (Tierney, Bergeson-Dana, & Pisoni, 2008) have been found for musicians when compared to non-musicians. A direct comparison between boundary density curves via cross-correlation (Hartmann et al, in press) showed that non-musicians were delayed with respect to musicians for most of the stimuli, although it did not result in differences between groups based on the mean lag across stimuli.…”

Musical training as an alternative and effective method for neuro-education and neuro-rehabilitation

“…Moreover, neural responses in both adult and child musicians differentiated familiar from unfamiliar sequences during the behavioral test. In a further study, François et al (2014) provided evidence that the ability to differentiate familiar from unfamiliar items was correlated with how fast a fronto-central negative ERP component emerged during the exposition to the artificial speech stream.…”

“…Further evidence of better speech processing skills in musicians than in non-musicians was also provided by cross-sectional and longitudinal studies exploring speech segmentation ability in adults and children ( François and Schön, 2011 ; François et al, 2013 , 2014 ). Speech segmentation is one of the mandatory steps for acquiring a new language, which requires the ability to extract words from continuous speech.…”

Infants Segment Words from Songs—An EEG Study

“…The present study assesses the efficacy of songs for infant language learning through a word segmentation paradigm, testing word segmentation within songs and speech as well as subsequent generalization to speech. Segmentation, i.e., extracting individual word forms from the continuous speech stream, in which word boundaries are not typically marked by pauses, presents a sensible starting point for this research agenda, as adults find songs easier to segment than speech [52]; musical expertise is associated with better and faster segmentation in adults [53][54][55][56][57]; and musical training facilitates word segmentation in children [15]. Moreover, segmentation is critical to successful language acquisition, as the vast majority of words spoken to infants appear in continuous speech [58,59], even if parents are instructed to teach their infant a word [60,61].…”