Differences in a Musician's Advantage for Speech-in-Speech Perception Based on Age and Task

Abstract

This study investigates the debate that musicians have an advantage in speech-in-noise perception from years of targeted auditory training. We also consider the effect of age on any such advantage, comparing musicians and nonmusicians (age range: 18-66 years), all of whom had normal hearing. We manipulate the degree of fundamental frequency (f o) separation between the competing talkers, as well as use different tasks, to probe attentional differences that might shape a musician's advantage across ages. Participants (ranging in age from 18 to 66 years) included 29 musicians and 26 nonmusicians. They completed two tasks varying in attentional demands: (a) a selective attention task where listeners identify the target sentence presented with a one-talker interferer (Experiment 1), and (b) a divided attention task where listeners hear two vowels played simultaneously and identify both competing vowels (Experiment 2). In both paradigms, f o separation was manipulated between the two voices (Δf o = 0, 0.156, 0.306, 1, 2, 3 semitones). Results show that increasing differences in f o separation lead to higher accuracy on both tasks. Additionally, we find evidence for a musician's advantage across the two studies. In the sentence identification task, younger adult musicians show higher accuracy overall, as well as a stronger reliance on f o separation. Yet, this advantage declines with musicians' age. In the double vowel identification task, musicians of all ages show an across-the-board advantage in detecting two vowels-and use f o separation more to aid in stream separation-but show no consistent difference in double vowel identification. Overall, we find support for a hybrid auditory encoding-attention account of music-to-speech transfer. The musician's advantage includes f o, but the benefit also depends on the attentional demands in the task and listeners' age. Taken together, this study suggests a complex relationship between age, musical experience, and speech-in-speech paradigm on a musician's advantage. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21956777.