Influence of Musical Training on Understanding Voiced and Whispered Speech in Noise

Dorea R. Ruggles,Andrew J. Oxenham,Richard L. Freyman,Manuel S. Malmierca

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0086980

Dorea R. Ruggles, Andrew J. Oxenham + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0086980

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Abstract

This study tested the hypothesis that the previously reported advantage of musicians over non-musicians in understanding speech in noise arises from more efficient or robust coding of periodic voiced speech, particularly in fluctuating backgrounds. Speech intelligibility was measured in listeners with extensive musical training, and in those with very little musical training or experience, using normal (voiced) or whispered (unvoiced) grammatically correct nonsense sentences in noise that was spectrally shaped to match the long-term spectrum of the speech, and was either continuous or gated with a 16-Hz square wave. Performance was also measured in clinical speech-in-noise tests and in pitch discrimination. Musicians exhibited enhanced pitch discrimination, as expected. However, no systematic or statistically significant advantage for musicians over non-musicians was found in understanding either voiced or whispered sentences in either continuous or gated noise. Musicians also showed no statistically significant advantage in the clinical speech-in-noise tests. Overall, the results provide no evidence for a significant difference between young adult musicians and non-musicians in their ability to understand speech in noise.

Highlights

Individuals with early and extensive musical training have been found to exhibit certain enhanced behavioral auditory abilities
The results with the voiced speech (VS) are shown in the left panel of Figure 1. These data show that the proportion of correctly identified words improved with increasing SNR, and that the improvement was more marked in the continuous noise than in the gated noise
The pattern of masking release in this condition was similar to that found in the VS condition, but the generally lower proportion of correct words is more similar to that found in the whispered speech (WS) condition

Summary

Introduction

Individuals with early and extensive musical training have been found to exhibit certain enhanced behavioral auditory abilities. Given the strong reliance of Western musical traditions on pitch, this advantage is perhaps not surprising, non-musicians tend to reach the same performance levels as professional musicians after about 6–8 hours of training in pitch discrimination [3]. A relationship between FFR and pitch discrimination has been suggested by the finding of enhancement in both measures following a period of perceptual training in pitch discrimination [7]. The periodicity in voiced speech sounds, such as vowels, elicits a pitch sensation that carries important information about prosody and segmentation in non-tone languages, such as English, and carries lexical information in tone languages, such as Chinese. A link between speech perception and subcortical periodicity coding has been suggested by the finding that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese tend to have a stronger and more robust FFR to tone words than do native speakers of American English [8]. Voiced speech is more intelligible than whispered speech when presented in noise [9], and altering the natural periodicity (or fundamental-frequency, F0) contour of voiced speech can impair its intelligibility in noise [10,11]

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