Reply to Schellenberg: Is there more to auditory plasticity than meets the ear?

Bidelman, Gavin M.; Mankel, Kelsey

doi:10.1073/pnas.1900068116

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…In conclusion, our findings confirm a relationship between musicianship and naturalistic cocktail party listening skills (stream segregation) but also suggest that cognitive factors may at least partially account for musicians' SIN advantage. Nevertheless, the degree to which music experience causally improves cocktail party speech processing (e.g., see Kraus et al, 2014;Slater et al, 2015;Tierney et al, 2015;Zendel et al, 2019) or is governed by preexisting factors unrelated to formal music training (e.g., inherent auditory aptitude; Mankel and Bidelman, 2018;Bidelman and Mankel, 2019;Mankel et al, 2020) awaits empirical confirmation with the present cross-sectional data.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…Still, not all studies report a positive effect, and some fail to find a musician advantage even on identical SIN tasks (e.g., QuickSIN and HINT) ( Ruggles et al, 2014 ; Boebinger et al, 2015 ; Madsen et al, 2017 ; Yeend et al, 2017 ; Escobar et al, 2020 ). The failure to replicate could be due to the small nature of this effect and/or, as we have previously suggested, unmeasured differences in music aptitude even among self-reported musicians that confer perceptual gains in SIN processing ( Bidelman and Mankel, 2019 ). Musicians’ SIN benefits are also more apparent in older adults ( Zendel and Alain, 2012 ), so the predominance of studies on young adults may not be representative of music-related SIN benefits.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

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Musicians Show Improved Speech Segregation in Competitive, Multi-Talker Cocktail Party Scenarios

Bidelman

Yoo

2020

Front. Psychol.

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Studies suggest that long-term music experience enhances the brain's ability to segregate speech from noise. Musicians' "speech-in-noise (SIN) benefit" is based largely on perception from simple figure-ground tasks rather than competitive, multitalker scenarios that offer realistic spatial cues for segregation and engage binaural processing. We aimed to investigate whether musicians show perceptual advantages in cocktail party speech segregation in a competitive, multi-talker environment. We used the coordinate response measure (CRM) paradigm to measure speech recognition and localization performance in musicians vs. non-musicians in a simulated 3D cocktail party environment conducted in an anechoic chamber. Speech was delivered through a 16-channel speaker array distributed around the horizontal soundfield surrounding the listener. Participants recalled the color, number, and perceived location of target callsign sentences. We manipulated task difficulty by varying the number of additional maskers presented at other spatial locations in the horizontal soundfield (0-1-2-3-4-6-8 multi-talkers). Musicians obtained faster and better speech recognition amidst up to around eight simultaneous talkers and showed less noise-related decline in performance with increasing interferers than their non-musician peers. Correlations revealed associations between listeners' years of musical training and CRM recognition and working memory. However, better working memory correlated with better speech streaming. Basic (QuickSIN) but not more complex (speech streaming) SIN processing was still predicted by music training after controlling for working memory. Our findings confirm a relationship between musicianship and naturalistic cocktail party speech streaming but also suggest that cognitive factors at least partially drive musicians' SIN advantage.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Musicians Show Improved Speech Segregation in Competitive, Multi-Talker Cocktail Party Scenarios

Bidelman

Yoo

2020

Front. Psychol.

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“…Additionally, vocabulary knowledge may differ in musicians which might partially account for their SIN benefits observed here (Anaya et al, 2016). Alternatively, musicians' enhanced SIN processing could also relate to innate auditory skills, irrespective of musical training or experience, per se (Bidelman & Mankel, 2019;Mankel & Bidelman, 2018). To the extent that musician SIN benefits do exist, future studies are needed to fully tease apart the relative contributions of psychophysical, cognitive, and preexisting factors underlying musicians' perceptual advantages (cf.…”

Section: Auditory Vs Cognitive Mechanisms Underlying Musician's Sin mentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic, perceptual, and cognitive factors underlying musicians’ benefits in noise-degraded speech perception

Yoo

Bidelman

2019

Hearing Research

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Previous studies have reported better speech-in-noise (SIN) recognition in musicians than nonmusicians while others have failed to observe this "musician SIN advantage." Here, we aimed to clarify equivocal findings and determine the most relevant perceptual and cognitive factors that do and do not account for musicians' benefits in SIN processing. We measured performance in musicians and nonmusicians on a battery of SIN recognition, auditory backward masking (a marker of attention), fluid intelligence (IQ), and working memory tasks. We found that musicians outperformed nonmusicians in SIN recognition but also demonstrated better performance in IQ, working memory, and attention. SIN advantages were restricted to more complex speech tasks featuring sentence-level recognition with speech-on-speech masking (i.e., QuickSIN) whereas no group differences were observed in non-speech simultaneous (noise-on-tone) masking. This suggests musicians' advantage is limited to cases where the noise interference is linguistic in nature. Correlations showed SIN scores were associated with working memory, reinforcing the importance of general cognition to degraded speech perception. Lastly, listeners' years of music training predicted auditory attention scores, working memory skills, general fluid intelligence, and SIN perception (i.e., QuickSIN scores), implying that extensive musical training enhances perceptual and cognitive skills. Overall, our results suggest (i) enhanced SIN recognition in musicians is due to improved parsing of competing linguistic signals rather than signal-in-noise extraction, per se, and (ii) cognitive factors (working memory, attention, IQ) at least partially drive musicians' SIN advantages.

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“…One study showed that students that were randomly assigned music training versus non-musical lessons had a significant increase in their IQ scores after a year 9 . However, cognitive advantages to musicians have not been consistently demonstrated and it may be that these effects are due to people with higher cognitive scores taking or persisting with music lessons or that there are links to preexisting innate interindividual differences 10 , 11 . There is evidence to suggest that musicians have better memory over shorter time scales than non-musicians and that this effect is moderated by the type of stimuli 12 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A specific relationship between musical sophistication and auditory working memory

Lad

Billig

Kumar

et al. 2022

Sci Rep

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Previous studies have found conflicting results between individual measures related to music and fundamental aspects of auditory perception and cognition. The results have been difficult to compare because of different musical measures being used and lack of uniformity in the auditory perceptual and cognitive measures. In this study we used a general construct of musicianship, musical sophistication, that can be applied to populations with widely different backgrounds. We investigated the relationship between musical sophistication and measures of perception and working memory for sound by using a task suitable to measure both. We related scores from the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index to performance on tests of perception and working memory for two acoustic features—frequency and amplitude modulation. The data show that musical sophistication scores are best related to working memory for frequency in an analysis that accounts for age and non-verbal intelligence. Musical sophistication was not significantly associated with working memory for amplitude modulation rate or with the perception of either acoustic feature. The work supports a specific association between musical sophistication and working memory for sound frequency.

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Reply to Schellenberg: Is there more to auditory plasticity than meets the ear?

Cited by 7 publications

References 11 publications

Musicians Show Improved Speech Segregation in Competitive, Multi-Talker Cocktail Party Scenarios

Musicians Show Improved Speech Segregation in Competitive, Multi-Talker Cocktail Party Scenarios

Linguistic, perceptual, and cognitive factors underlying musicians’ benefits in noise-degraded speech perception

A specific relationship between musical sophistication and auditory working memory

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