Linguistic, perceptual, and cognitive factors underlying musicians’ benefits in noise-degraded speech perception

Abstract

Previous studies have reported better speech-in-noise (SIN) recognition in musicians than nonmusicians while others have failed to observe this "musician SIN advantage." Here, we aimed to clarify equivocal findings and determine the most relevant perceptual and cognitive factors that do and do not account for musicians' benefits in SIN processing. We measured performance in musicians and nonmusicians on a battery of SIN recognition, auditory backward masking (a marker of attention), fluid intelligence (IQ), and working memory tasks. We found that musicians outperformed nonmusicians in SIN recognition but also demonstrated better performance in IQ, working memory, and attention. SIN advantages were restricted to more complex speech tasks featuring sentence-level recognition with speech-on-speech masking (i.e., QuickSIN) whereas no group differences were observed in non-speech simultaneous (noise-on-tone) masking. This suggests musicians' advantage is limited to cases where the noise interference is linguistic in nature. Correlations showed SIN scores were associated with working memory, reinforcing the importance of general cognition to degraded speech perception. Lastly, listeners' years of music training predicted auditory attention scores, working memory skills, general fluid intelligence, and SIN perception (i.e., QuickSIN scores), implying that extensive musical training enhances perceptual and cognitive skills. Overall, our results suggest (i) enhanced SIN recognition in musicians is due to improved parsing of competing linguistic signals rather than signal-in-noise extraction, per se, and (ii) cognitive factors (working memory, attention, IQ) at least partially drive musicians' SIN advantages.

Musicians Show Improved Speech Segregation in Competitive, Multi-Talker Cocktail Party Scenarios

“…Our findings parallel Schellenberg (2011) who found that musicianship was associated with IQ and Digit Span (WM and attention). They also converge with studies demonstrating relations between cognition (e.g., WM and auditory attention) and SIN performance in musical individuals (Strait and Kraus, 2011;Sares et al, 2018;Yoo and Bidelman, 2019;but see Escobar et al, 2020). Thus, musicians' cocktail party benefits observed here might result from a refinement in both auditory-perceptual and cognitive abilities, both of which could aid degraded speech-listening skills.…”

Autonomic Nervous System Correlates of Speech Categorization Revealed Through Pupillometry

“…Each participant was strongly right-handed (87.0 ± 18.2 laterality index; Oldfield, 1971) and had obtained a collegiate level of education (17.8 ± 1.9 years). Musical training enhances categorical processing and speech-in-noise listening abilities (Bidelman et al, 2014;Yoo and Bidelman, 2019). Consequently, all participants were required to have < 3 years of music training throughout their lifetime (mean years of training: 1.3 ± 1.8 years).…”

Effects of Noise on the Behavioral and Neural Categorization of Speech

“…Each participant was strongly right-handed (87.0 ± 18.2% laterality index; Oldfield, 1971) and had obtained a collegiate level of education (17.8 ± 1.9 years). Musical training is known to modulate categorical processing and SIN listening abilities (Parbery-Clark et al, 2009;Bidelman and Krishnan, 2010;Zendel and Alain, 2012;Bidelman et al, 2014;Bidelman and Alain, 2015b;Yoo and Bidelman, 2019). Consequently, we required that all participants had minimal music training throughout their lifetime (mean years of training: 1.3 ± 1.8 years).…”