Effects of age and musical expertise on perception of speech in speech maskers in adults

Abstract

Perceiving “cocktail party” speech, or speech-on-speech (SoS), requires perceptual mechanisms such as segregating target from masking speech using voice cues, and on cognitive mechanisms such as selective attention and inhibition. Both aging and musical expertise have been shown to affect these mechanisms. Voice cues that help distinguish different speakers include mean fundamental frequency (F0), related to voice pitch, and the vocal-tract length (VTL), related to speaker size. Some studies reported older adults’ decreased sensitivity to F0 differences, possibly affecting their ability to discriminate speakers. Furthermore, age-related cognitive changes may lead to difficulties in attention direction and inhibition. Compared to non-musicians, musicians are reported to show enhanced processing of acoustic features such as F0, as well as enhanced cognitive abilities such as auditory attention skills and working memory. While this intuitively could lead to a musician advantage for SoS, reports of musicians outperforming non-musicians are inconsistent across both younger and older adults. Differences across previous SoS paradigms have made comparison of musicianship advantages in SoS in younger and older adults—and underlying mechanisms—difficult. Therefore, we investigated the extent to which older compared to younger adults benefit from either musical expertise or F0 and VTL differences between target and masker voices.