title: Musicians and non-musicians are equally adept at perceiving masked speech.
abstract: There is much interest in the idea that musicians perform better than non-musicians in understanding speech in background noise. Research in this area has often used energetic maskers, which have their effects primarily at the auditory periphery. However, masking interference can also occur at more central auditory levels, known as informational masking. This experiment extends existing research by using multiple maskers that vary in their informational content and similarity to speech, in order to examine differences in perception of masked speech between trained musicians (n = 25) and non-musicians (n = 25). Although musicians outperformed non-musicians on a measure of frequency discrimination, they showed no advantage in perceiving masked speech. Further analysis revealed that non-verbal IQ, rather than musicianship, significantly predicted speech reception thresholds in noise. The results strongly suggest that the contribution of general cognitive abilities needs to be taken into account in any investigations of individual variability for perceiving speech in noise.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Dana
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Boebinger
authors.affiliation: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Samuel
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Evans
authors.affiliation: Speech, Hearing & Phonetic Sciences, University College London, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 2PF, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Stuart
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rosen
authors.affiliation: Centre for Psychology at University of Porto, Rua Alfredo Allen, 4200-135 Porto, Portugal.
authors.forename: César F
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Lima
authors.affiliation: Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 7EF, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Tom
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Manly
authors.affiliation: Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Sophie K
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Scott
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001309:Auditory Threshold / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D009622:Noise; D009790:Occupations; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D013065:Speech Intelligibility / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D057190:Stroop Test; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology; D014888:Wechsler Scales; D055815:Young Adult