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

Abstract

Speech-on-speech (SoS) perception relies on perceptual mechanisms, such as discriminating mean fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal-tract length (VTL), and cognitive mechanisms, such as selective attention and working memory. Older adults may be less sensitive to F0 differences, possibly affecting their ability to perceive different speakers. Age-related cognitive changes may lead to difficulties in attention direction and inhibition. Compared to non-musicians, musicians are reported to possess 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 perception, reports of musicians outperforming non-musicians on SoS tasks are inconsistent across both younger and older adults. Differences in SoS paradigms across the literature have made it difficult to directly compare musicianship advantages in SoS perception in younger and older adults, or to clarify related underlying mechanisms. In this study, we investigated the extent to which older compared to younger adults benefit from voice differences in an SoS perception task, by manipulating differences in F0 and VTL cues between target and masker speakers. Furthermore, we investigated the effect of musical expertise in younger and older adults within the same SoS task.