Musical Experience Offsets Age-Related Decline in Understanding Speech-in-Noise: Type of Training Does Not Matter, Working Memory Is the Key

Abstract

Objectives: Speech comprehension under “cocktail party” scenarios deteriorates with age even in the absence of measurable hearing loss. Musical training is suggested to counteract the age-related decline in speech-in-noise (SIN) perception, yet which aspect of musical plasticity contributes to this compensation remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate the effects of musical experience and aging on SIN perception ability. We hypothesized a key mediation role of auditory working memory in ameliorating deficient SIN perception in older adults by musical training. Design: Forty-eight older musicians, 29 older nonmusicians, 48 young musicians, and 24 young nonmusicians all with (near) normal peripheral hearing were recruited. The SIN task was recognizing nonsense speech sentences either perceptually colocated or separated with a noise masker (energetic masking) or a two-talker speech masker (informational masking). Auditory working memory was measured by auditory digit span. Path analysis was used to examine the direct and indirect effects of musical expertise and age on SIN perception performance. Results: Older musicians outperformed older nonmusicians in auditory working memory and all SIN conditions (noise separation, noise colocation, speech separation, speech colocation), but such musician advantages were absent in young adults. Path analysis showed that age and musical training had opposite effects on auditory working memory, which played a significant mediation role in SIN perception. In addition, the type of musical training did not differentiate SIN perception regardless of age. Conclusions: These results provide evidence that musical training offsets age-related speech perception deficit at adverse listening conditions by preserving auditory working memory. Our findings highlight auditory working memory in supporting speech perception amid competing noise in older adults, and underline musical training as a means of “cognitive reserve” against declines in speech comprehension and cognition in aging populations.

Musical Sophistication and Speech Auditory-Motor Coupling: Easy Tests for Quick Answers

“…Individuals with high vs. low synchrony behavior-despite strong differences in whether they received musical training and the overall years of trainingshowed no differences in the type of musical instrument they were trained on. In line with our findings, others have shown no effect of the type of musical training on auditory psychophysical measures (comparing violinist and pianists: Carey et al, 2015), or on an age-related benefit from musical training for speech perception in noise (comparing several instrument families: Zhang et al, 2020).…”

“…Although, the generalizability of musical training to higher cognitive and non-music-related tasks (beyond pitch processing) has been discussed controversially ( Moreno and Bidelman, 2014 ; Ruggles et al, 2014 ; Carey et al, 2015 ), many studies report beneficial effects on auditory perception. For example, musical training has been suggested to increase auditory working memory ( Zhang et al, 2020 ), aspects of auditory scene analysis ( Pelofi et al, 2017 ), or inhibitory control ( Slater et al, 2018 ). Furthermore, many studies have reported that musical training affects speech perception in noise ( Parbery-Clark et al, 2011 ; Strait and Kraus, 2011 ; Swaminathan et al, 2015 ; Varnet et al, 2015 ; Zendel et al, 2015 ; Coffey et al, 2017a ; Puschmann et al, 2018 ; Yoo and Bidelman, 2019 ), while additional variables might affect the outcome of such a comparison ( Ruggles et al, 2014 ; Boebinger et al, 2015 ; Yoo and Bidelman, 2019 ; for a review see, Coffey et al, 2017b ).…”

“…These were related to improved inhibitory control and have been shown to more strongly impact speech in noise perception compared to vocal training ( Slater and Kraus, 2016 ; Slater et al, 2017 , 2018 ). However, other studies did not report the effects of the type of musical instrument on the training benefit for auditory psychophysical measures (comparing violinist and pianists: Carey et al, 2015 ), or on an age-related benefit from musical training for speech perception in noise (comparing several instrument families: Zhang et al, 2020 ). Both, auditory-motor coupling ( Assaneo and Poeppel, 2018 ; Assaneo et al, 2019a , 2021 ) and speech perception ( Ghitza, 2011 ; Giraud and Poeppel, 2012 ; Gross et al, 2013 ; Hyafil et al, 2015 ; Rimmele et al, 2015 , 2018 , 2021 ; Kösem and van Wassenhove, 2017 ) have been related to rhythmic processing.…”

The impairment of speech perception in noise following pure tone hearing recovery in patients with sudden sensorineural hearing loss

“…A set of special Chinese nonsense sentences 13 , 16 were used as target ones which were translated from English nonsense sentences developed by Helfer 12 , 16 – 19 . For instance, the English translation of a Chinese nonsense sentence “一些条令已经翻译我的大衣” is “Some rules had translated my coat ” (the three 2-character keywords are italic) 17 . Target sentences with a naturally stable rate were spoken by a young female talker (talker A) at an average rate of 5.4 syllables/s (with the standard deviation of 0.7 syllables/s), while the duration of a sentence was about 2–3 s. The noise masker was a stream of steady-state speech-spectrum noise, whose spectrum was representative of the average spectrum of target sentences.…”

Lip movements enhance speech representations and effective connectivity in speech dorsal stream and its relationship with neurite architecture

“…Speech perception becomes challenging in noisy environments and older adults (Du, Buchsbaum, Grady, & Alain, 2016; L. Zhang, Fu, Luo, Xing, & Du, 2021).…”