Discrimination of Speech and Music in Quiet and in Noise: Are Musicians better than Non Musicians?

Previous studies indicate that musicians show superior psychoacoustic and auditory processing skills. These exceptional abilities have been demonstrated in various ways including brain imaging, evoked auditory potentials and psychoacoustic tests. The purpose of the present work was to understand whether these abilities are related to central auditory processing and the recognition of speech in noise. 18 subjects (9 professional musicians and 9 non-musicians) were asked to discriminate between stimuli presented in quiet and at three different signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios. Stimuli were presented in a three – interval- forced-choice paradigm. Stimuli included speech and musical signals that were matched conceptually: speech signals contained three syllables (ba/da/ga), whereas each of the musical signals included a short (80ms) disharmonic part (sekundas) and long (220 ms) harmonic part (c major chord). Musical stimuli differed from each other by the short part; that is, each stimulus contained a different sekunda. Results showed that musicians had similar discrimination abilities for music and speech stimuli, whereas non-musicians showed a significant decrease in discrimination between musical stimuli for all noise conditions, and despite fair discrimination in quiet. In addition, musicians achieved faster reaction times for musical and speech stimuli for all listening conditions. These findings support the assumption that musical training has an extended impact on speech perception and adds to the emerging evidence that musical experience has an important role in auditory training and language intervention.