Musicians have a variety of perceptual and cortical specializations compared to non-musicians. Recent studies have shown that potentials evoked from primarily brainstem structures are enhanced in musicians, compared to non-musicians. Specifically, musicians have more robust representations of pitch periodicity and faster neural timing to sound onset when listening to sounds or both listening to and viewing a speaker. However, it is not known whether musician-related enhancements at the subcortical level are correlated with specializations in the cortex. Does musical training shape the auditory system in a coordinated manner or in disparate ways at cortical and subcortical levels? To answer this question, we recorded simultaneous brainstem and cortical evoked responses in musician and non-musician subjects. Brainstem response periodicity was related to early cortical response timing across all subjects, and this relationship was stronger in musicians. Peaks of the brainstem response evoked by sound onset and timbre cues were also related to cortical timing. Neurophysiological measures at both levels correlated with musical skill scores across all subjects. In addition, brainstem and cortical measures correlated with the age musicians began their training and the years of musical practice. Taken together, these data imply that neural representations of pitch, timing and timbre cues and cortical response timing are shaped in a coordinated manner, and indicate corticofugal modulation of subcortical afferent circuitry.

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Much of our daily communication occurs in the presence of background noise, compromising our ability to hear. While understanding speech in noise is a challenge for everyone, it becomes increasingly difficult as we age. Although aging is generally accompanied by hearing loss, this perceptual decline cannot fully account for the difficulties experienced by older adults for hearing in noise. Decreased cognitive skills concurrent with reduced perceptual acuity are thought to contribute to the difficulty older adults experience understanding speech in noise. Given that musical experience positively impacts speech perception in noise in young adults (ages 18–30), we asked whether musical experience benefits an older cohort of musicians (ages 45–65), potentially offsetting the age-related decline in speech-in-noise perceptual abilities and associated cognitive function (i.e., working memory). Consistent with performance in young adults, older musicians demonstrated enhanced speech-in-noise perception relative to nonmusicians along with greater auditory, but not visual, working memory capacity. By demonstrating that speech-in-noise perception and related cognitive function are enhanced in older musicians, our results imply that musical training may reduce the impact of age-related auditory decline.

For children, learning often occurs in the presence of background noise. As such, there is growing desire to improve a child’s access to a target signal in noise. Given adult musicians’ perceptual and neural speech-in-noise enhancements, we asked whether similar effects are present in musically-trained children. We assessed the perception and subcortical processing of speech in noise and related cognitive abilities in musician and nonmusician children that were matched for a variety of overarching factors. Outcomes reveal that musicians’ advantages for processing speech in noise are present during pivotal developmental years. Supported by correlations between auditory working memory and attention and auditory brainstem response properties, we propose that musicians’ perceptual and neural enhancements are driven in a top-down manner by strengthened cognitive abilities with training. Our results may be considered by professionals involved in the remediation of language-based learning deficits, which are often characterized by poor speech perception in noise.

Temporal cues are important for discerning word boundaries and syllable segments in speech; their perception facilitates language acquisition and development. Beat synchronization and neural encoding of speech reflect precision in processing temporal cues and have been linked to reading skills. In poor readers, diminished neural precision may contribute to rhythmic and phonological deficits. Here we establish links between beat synchronization and speech processing in children who have not yet begun to read: preschoolers who can entrain to an external beat have more faithful neural encoding of temporal modulations in speech and score higher on tests of early language skills. In summary, we propose precise neural encoding of temporal modulations as a key mechanism underlying reading acquisition. Because beat synchronization abilities emerge at an early age, these findings may inform strategies for early detection of and intervention for languagebased learning disabilities.iteracy skills are critical for school success, employment, and general well-being (1), but reading disorders plague a significant portion (5-10%) of the population (2). Although we can characterize the perceptual and physiological deficits generally observed in reading-impaired individuals, each child is unique, challenging both diagnosis and intervention. Developmentally, speech rhythm is one of the earliest cues used by infants to segment speech and discern phonemes (3, 4), and parents naturally use emphatic stress and exaggerated rhythmic patterns to teach children language (5). Children and adults with dyslexia struggle to pick up on these rhythmic patterns (6), and this struggle may reflect a temporal encoding deficit underlying reading disabilities (5, 7). Furthermore, many reading-impaired children have pronounced problems with phonological awareness (i.e., the knowledge of which acoustic distinctions in speech are meaningful) that stem, at least in part, from deficient speechsound processing (8-12). Therefore, we posit that sensitivity to temporal modulations in speech influences the neural processing of discrete speech components and that a breakdown of the temporal encoding of speech segments may impede the development of phonological skills critical for language learning.Beat synchronization (a task necessitating precise integration of auditory perception and motor production) has offered an intriguing window into the biology of reading ability and its substrate skills. Converging lines of evidence indicate that children and adults who struggle to synchronize to a beat also struggle to read and have deficient neural encoding of sound (13-16). The preschool years constitute a sensitive period for phonological development, a time when experience with language and its internalization lay the foundation for reading acquisition (17). Here, we examined preschoolers' ability to synchronize their drumming to that of an experimenter (using drumming rates that approximated phonemic rates), language skills, and neural encoding of temporal modul...