Musical training improves the ability to understand speech-in-noise in older adults

Zendel, Benjamin Rich; West, Greg L.; Belleville, Sylvie; Peretz, Isabelle

doi:10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2019.05.015

Cited by 60 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…This is in line with previous reports that age-related declines in speech-in-noise perception are smaller in musicians (Zendel & Alain, 2012), and that older adults assigned music training showed gains in speech-in-noise perception relative to a control group who were assigned to learn a visuo-spatial video game (Zendel, West, Belleville, & Peretz, 2019). With respect to the putative link between attention and speech-in-speech perception mentioned just above, adulthood (Amer, Kalender, Hasher, Trehub, & Wong, 2013;Zendel & Alain, 2013;Moussard, Bermudez, Alain, Tays, & Moreno, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Speech-in-speech perception, nonverbal selective attention, and musical training.

Tierney¹,

Rosen

Dick³

2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable listeners to more successfully ignore distracting speech, and so individual differences in selective attention may be one factor driving the ability to perceive speech in complex environments. However, the lack of a paradigm for measuring non-verbal sustained selective attention to sound has made this hypothesis difficult to test. Here we find that individuals who are better able to attend to a stream of tones and respond to occasional repeated sequences while ignoring a distractor tone stream are also better able to perceive speech masked by a single distractor talker. We also find that participants who have undergone more musical training show better performance on both verbal and non-verbal selective attention tasks, and this musician advantage is greater in older participants. This suggests that one source of a potential musician advantage for speech perception in complex environments may be experience or skill in directing and maintaining attention to a single auditory object.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Speech-in-speech perception, nonverbal selective attention, and musical training.

Tierney¹,

Rosen

Dick³

2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…In conclusion, our findings confirm a relationship between musicianship and naturalistic cocktail party listening skills (stream segregation) but also suggest that cognitive factors may at least partially account for musicians' SIN advantage. Nevertheless, the degree to which music experience causally improves cocktail party speech processing (e.g., see Kraus et al, 2014;Slater et al, 2015;Tierney et al, 2015;Zendel et al, 2019) or is governed by preexisting factors unrelated to formal music training (e.g., inherent auditory aptitude; Mankel and Bidelman, 2018;Bidelman and Mankel, 2019;Mankel et al, 2020) awaits empirical confirmation with the present cross-sectional data.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…Our results are correlational in nature. Nevertheless, longitudinal (Torppa et al, 2018) and both quasi-and randomized-training studies in both younger and older adults (e.g., Kraus et al, 2014;Slater et al, 2015;Tierney et al, 2015;Zendel et al, 2019;Lo et al, 2020) provide converging evidence that musicianship causes gains in SIN processing in an experience-dependent manner.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Bidelman

Yoo

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Studies suggest that long-term music experience enhances the brain's ability to segregate speech from noise. Musicians' "speech-in-noise (SIN) benefit" is based largely on perception from simple figure-ground tasks rather than competitive, multitalker scenarios that offer realistic spatial cues for segregation and engage binaural processing. We aimed to investigate whether musicians show perceptual advantages in cocktail party speech segregation in a competitive, multi-talker environment. We used the coordinate response measure (CRM) paradigm to measure speech recognition and localization performance in musicians vs. non-musicians in a simulated 3D cocktail party environment conducted in an anechoic chamber. Speech was delivered through a 16-channel speaker array distributed around the horizontal soundfield surrounding the listener. Participants recalled the color, number, and perceived location of target callsign sentences. We manipulated task difficulty by varying the number of additional maskers presented at other spatial locations in the horizontal soundfield (0-1-2-3-4-6-8 multi-talkers). Musicians obtained faster and better speech recognition amidst up to around eight simultaneous talkers and showed less noise-related decline in performance with increasing interferers than their non-musician peers. Correlations revealed associations between listeners' years of musical training and CRM recognition and working memory. However, better working memory correlated with better speech streaming. Basic (QuickSIN) but not more complex (speech streaming) SIN processing was still predicted by music training after controlling for working memory. Our findings confirm a relationship between musicianship and naturalistic cocktail party speech streaming but also suggest that cognitive factors at least partially drive musicians' SIN advantage.

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“…Indeed, a musicians' advantage for SiN perception has been reported by a number of studies in adults and children (Parbery-Clark et al, 2009;Strait et al, 2012Strait et al, , 2013Bidelman et al, 2014;Kraus et al, 2014;Slater et al, 2015;Baskent and Gaudrain, 2016). However, there are also a substantial number of studies that failed to find strong evidence in favor of advantages in musicians (Strait et al, 2012;Fuller et al, 2014;Ruggles et al, 2014;Boebinger et al, 2015;Fleming et al, 2019;Zendel et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the Effect of One Year of Learning to Play a Musical Instrument on Speech-in-Noise Perception and Phonological Short-Term Memory in 5-to-7-Year-Old Children

et al. 2020

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The benefits in speech-in-noise perception, language and cognition brought about by extensive musical training in adults and children have been demonstrated in a number of cross-sectional studies. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate whether one year of school-delivered musical training, consisting of individual and group instrumental classes, was capable of producing advantages for speech-in-noise perception and phonological short-term memory in children tested in a simulated classroom environment. Forty-one children aged 5-7 years at the first measurement point participated in the study and either went to a music-focused or a sport-focused private school with an otherwise equivalent school curriculum. The children's ability to detect number and color words in noise was measured under a number of conditions including different masker types (speech-shaped noise, single-talker background) and under varying spatial combinations of target and masker (spatially collocated, spatially separated). Additionally, a cognitive factor essential to speech perception, namely phonological short-term memory, was assessed. Findings were unable to confirm that musical training of the frequency and duration administered was associated with a musicians' advantage for either speech in noise, under any of the masker or spatial conditions tested, or phonological short-term memory.

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Musical training improves the ability to understand speech-in-noise in older adults

Cited by 60 publications

References 76 publications

Speech-in-speech perception, nonverbal selective attention, and musical training.

Speech-in-speech perception, nonverbal selective attention, and musical training.

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

Investigating the Effect of One Year of Learning to Play a Musical Instrument on Speech-in-Noise Perception and Phonological Short-Term Memory in 5-to-7-Year-Old Children

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