Abstract
Earlier studies have shown that musically trained individuals may have a benefit in adverse listening situations when compared to non-musicians, especially in speech-on-speech perception. However, the literature provides mostly conflicting results. In the current study, by employing different measures of spoken language processing, we aimed to test whether we could capture potential differences between musicians and non-musicians in speech-on-speech processing. We used an offline measure of speech perception (sentence recall task), which reveals a post-task response, and online measures of real time spoken language processing: gaze-tracking and pupillometry. We used stimuli of comparable complexity across both paradigms and tested the same groups of participants. In the sentence recall task, musicians recalled more words correctly than non-musicians. In the eye-tracking experiment, both groups showed reduced fixations to the target and competitor words’ images as the level of speech maskers increased. The time course of gaze fixations to the competitor did not differ between groups in the speech-in-quiet condition, while the time course dynamics did differ between groups as the two-talker masker was added to the target signal. As the level of two-talker masker increased, musicians showed reduced lexical competition as indicated by the gaze fixations to the competitor. The pupil dilation data showed differences mainly in one target-to-masker ratio. This does not allow to draw conclusions regarding potential differences in the use of cognitive resources between groups. Overall, the eye-tracking measure enabled us to observe that musicians may be using a different strategy than non-musicians to attain spoken word recognition as the noise level increased. However, further investigation with more fine-grained alignment between the processes captured by online and offline measures is necessary to establish whether musicians differ due to better cognitive control or sound processing.
Highlights
Musical training may grant normal-hearing listeners an advantage in auditory tasks, for tasks related to music, and in encoding and processing speech in adverse listening conditions (e.g., Kraus and Chandrasekaran, 2010), such as in the presence of competing talkers (e.g., Başkent and Gaudrain, 2016)
The current study examined whether and in what ways speechon-speech perception differed between musicians and non-musicians
Previous literature showed that there may be an effect of musical experience on speech perception in the presence of speech maskers, yet, the findings have not been consistent across studies that used offline measures
Summary
Musical training may grant normal-hearing listeners an advantage in auditory tasks, for tasks related to music, and in encoding and processing speech in adverse listening conditions (e.g., Kraus and Chandrasekaran, 2010), such as in the presence of competing talkers (e.g., Başkent and Gaudrain, 2016). Various studies that investigated whether long-term musical training improves speech-in-noise processing yielded conflicting results (for a review, see Coffey et al, 2017). Inconsistency in findings is fueled by the challenges to reproducibility across paradigms and labs and by different levels of complexity in signal-noise properties (Swaminathan et al, 2015), as well as considerable individual variability that is inherent to speech processing in adverse listening conditions (e.g., Peelle, 2018). We used stimuli of comparable complexity across different measures of spoken language processing within the same group of participants. With this approach, we aimed to investigate whether we can find differences in speech-on-speech processing between musicians and non-musicians consistent within groups across all measures
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