Abstract
Both musical training and native language have been shown to have experience-based plastic effects on auditory processing. However, the combined effects within individuals are unclear. Recent research suggests that musical training and tone language speaking are not clearly additive in their effects on processing of auditory features and that there may be a disconnect between perceptual and neural signatures of auditory feature processing. The literature has only recently begun to investigate the effects of musical expertise on basic auditory processing for different linguistic groups. This work provides a profile of primary auditory feature discrimination for Mandarin speaking musicians and nonmusicians. The musicians showed enhanced perceptual discrimination for both frequency and duration as well as enhanced duration discrimination in a multifeature discrimination task, compared to nonmusicians. However, there were no differences between the groups in duration processing of nonspeech sounds at a subcortical level or in subcortical frequency representation of a nonnative tone contour, for fo or for the first or second formant region. The results indicate that musical expertise provides a cognitive, but not subcortical, advantage in a population of Mandarin speakers.
Highlights
The plastic effects of musical training on the brain have gained great interest in the research community [1]
55 of them participated in the auditory brainstem response (ABR) data collection (20 males, 26 nonmusicians, 29 musicians)
Musicians were defined as having more than 6 years of formal musical training and weekly musical practice, and nonmusicians were defined as having fewer than 2 years of musical training and no regular musical hobbies
Summary
The plastic effects of musical training on the brain have gained great interest in the research community [1]. Musical training has been shown to be associated with perceptual benefits in lower frequency discrimination thresholds for pure tones [2,3] and faster and more accurate detection of small pitch changes [4] in nonspeech sounds and in a foreign language [5], compared to nonmusicians. Musicians have shown enhanced mismatch negativity (MMN) to slightly detuned chords, indicating more precise detection of frequency deviations [6]. Musicians show enhanced phase locking and pitch representation in the frequency following response (FFR) in both musical and speech sounds [7,8], enhanced representation of spectral content which contains vocal emotion [9,10], and enhanced.
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