Musicians’ speech-in-speech perception by age (Cohn et al., 2023)

<strong>Purpose:</strong> 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 (<em>f</em>_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. <strong>Method:</strong> 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, <em>f</em>_o separation was manipulated between the two voices (Δ<em>f</em>_o = 0, 0.156, 0.306, 1, 2, 3 semitones). <strong>Results: </strong>Results show that increasing differences in <em>f</em>_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 <em>f</em>_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 <em>f</em>_o separation more to aid in stream separation—but show no consistent difference in double vowel identification. <strong>Conclusions:</strong> Overall, we find support for a hybrid <em>auditory encoding-attention account </em>of music-to-speech transfer: The musician’s advantage includes <em>f</em>_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. <strong>Supplemental Material S1.</strong> Summary of musician’s advantage for speech-in-speech. <strong>Supplemental Material S2.</strong> Calculations of semitone separation based on Kishon-Rabin et al. (2001). <strong>Supplemental Material S3.</strong> Sentence identification (Experiment 1): Posterior means (Estimate), standard deviation of the posterior (Error), 95% credible intervals (Q2.5, Q97.5), and percent of posterior distribution above or below zero, for fixed effects. Effects whose credible intervals do not include zero, or those with 95% of their distribution on one side of 0 are in bold. <strong>Supplemental Material S4. </strong>Confusion matrix for participants who did not reach 90% in single vowel identification (shown in percentages). <strong>Supplemental Material S5.</strong> Confusion matrix for YA non-musicians who did reach 90% in single vowel identification (shown in percentages). <strong>Supplemental Material S6.</strong> Confusion matrix for YA musicians who did reach 90% in single vowel identification (shown in percentages). <strong>Supplemental Material S7.</strong> Confusion matrix for OA non-musicians who did reach 90% in single vowel identification (shown in percentages). <strong>Supplemental Material S8.</strong> Confusion matrix for OA musicians who did reach 90% in single vowel identification (shown in percentages). <strong>Supplemental Material S9.</strong> Double vowel identification (Experiment 2): Posterior means (Estimate), standard deviation of the posterior (Error), 95% credible intervals (Q2.5, Q97.5), and percent of posterior distribution above or below zero, for fixed effects. Effects whose credible intervals do not include zero, or those with 95% of their distribution on one side of 0 are in bold. Cohn, M., Barreda, S., &amp; Zellou, G. (2023). Differences in a musician’s advantage for speech-in-speech perception based on age and task. <em>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 66</em>(2), 545–564. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_JSLHR-22-00259