Differences in a Musician's Advantage for Speech-in-Speech Perception Based on Age and Task

Purpose: This study investigates the debate that musicians have an advantage in speech-in-noise perception from years of targeted auditory training. We also consider the effect of age on any such advantage, comparing musicians and nonmusicians (age range: 18-66 years), all of whom had normal hearing. We manipulate the degree of fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) separation between the competing talkers, as well as use different tasks, to probe attentional differences that might shape a musician's advantage across ages. Method: Participants (ranging in age from 18 to 66 years) included 29 musicians and 26 nonmusicians. They completed two tasks varying in attentional demands: (a) a selective attention task where listeners identify the target sentence presented with a one-talker interferer (Experiment 1), and (b) a divided attention task where listeners hear two vowels played simultaneously and identify both competing vowels (Experiment 2). In both paradigms, f[subscript o] separation was manipulated between the two voices ([delta]f[subscript o] = 0, 0.156, 0.306, 1, 2, 3 semitones). Results: Results show that increasing differences in f[subscript o] separation lead to higher accuracy on both tasks. Additionally, we find evidence for a musician's advantage across the two studies. In the sentence identification task, younger adult musicians show higher accuracy overall, as well as a stronger reliance on f[subscript o] separation. Yet, this advantage declines with musicians' age. In the double vowel identification task, musicians of all ages show an across-the-board advantage in detecting two vowels--and use f[subscript o] separation more to aid in stream separation--but show no consistent difference in double vowel identification. Conclusions: Overall, we find support for a hybrid auditory encoding-attention account of music-to-speech transfer. The musician's advantage includes f[subscript o], but the benefit also depends on the attentional demands in the task and listeners' age. Taken together, this study suggests a complex relationship between age, musical experience, and speech-in-speech paradigm on a musician's advantage.