Abstract
Past research has shown that musical training induces changes in the processing of supra-segmental aspects of speech, such as pitch and prosody. The aim of the present study was to determine whether musical expertise also leads to an altered neurophysiological processing of sub-segmental information available in the speech signal, in particular the voice-onset-time. Using high-density EEG-recordings we analyzed the neurophysiological responses to voiced and unvoiced consonant-vowel-syllables and noise-analogs in 26 German speaking adult musicians and non-musicians. From the EEG the N1 amplitude of the event-related potential and two microstates from the topographical EEG analysis (one around the N1 amplitude and one immediately preceding the N1 microstate) were calculated to the different stimuli. Similar to earlier studies the N1 amplitude was different to voiced and unvoiced stimuli in non-musicians with larger amplitudes to voiced stimuli. The more refined microstate analysis revealed that the microstate within the N1 time window was shorter to unvoiced stimuli in non-musicians. For musicians there was no difference for the N1 amplitudes and the corresponding microstates between voiced and unvoiced stimuli. In addition, there was a longer very early microstate preceding the microstate at the N1 time window to non-speech stimuli only in musicians. Taken together, our findings suggest that musicians process unvoiced stimuli (irrespective whether these stimuli are speech or non-speech stimuli) differently than controls. We propose that musicians utilize the same network to analyze unvoiced stimuli as for the analysis of voiced stimuli. As a further explanation it is also possible that musicians devote more neurophysiological resources into the analysis of unvoiced segments.
Highlights
The past 15 years have seen a vast amount of research on music and associated neural processes
Efficient analysis of spectral acoustic information in the speech signal is crucial for auditory language perception, but the same is true for temporal cues (Shannon et al, 1995; Davis and Johnsrude, 2007)
There was a significant voiceness by speechness [F(1, 24) = 1.217, p < 0.05] interaction characterized by higher accuracies for voiced than unvoiced non-speech stimuli [T(25) = 5.296, p < 0.05] and for unvoiced speech than unvoiced non-speech stimuli [T(25) = 3.929, p < 0.05]
Summary
The past 15 years have seen a vast amount of research on music and associated neural processes. A number of recent studies indicate that the language network is affected by plastic alterations due to musical training (e.g., Thompson et al, 2003; Schön et al, 2004; Moreno and Besson, 2006; Besson et al, 2007; Marques et al, 2007; Parbery-Clark et al, 2009; Gordon et al, 2010; Marie et al, 2010a,b; Colombo et al, 2011) Most of these studies focused on pitch processing and prosody, showing a substantial transfer effect of intensive musical training on auditory language functions. A similar finding has been provided by Marie et al (2010a), who examined whether musical expertise has an effect on the discrimination of tonal and segmental variations in tone language They measured event-related potentials (ERPs) and identified that musical expertise did not influence segmental processing as indicated by the amplitudes and latencies of early components like the N1. These authors, demonstrated strong influences of musical expertise on the later occurring “cognitive” ERP components (N2, P3a, and P3b)
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