The Effects of Musical Training on Speech Detection in the Presence of Informational and Energetic Masking.
Charlotte Morse-Fortier, Mary M Parrish, Jane A Baran and 1 others
PMID 29161982WHAT IT FOUND
Musicians detected target words better than nonmusicians when target and two talkers came from the same spot.
They showed no clear advantage when pitch cues were removed or when sound came from separate speakers. Training length did not predict performance.
Key findings
01In the natural nonspatial condition, musicians had a mean threshold of minus 7.75 dB SNR and nonmusicians minus 4.56 dB SNR, a reported difference of 3.19 dB.
02Musicians also had better average thresholds in the remaining three conditions, but those differences did not reach statistical significance.
03Years of musical training did not correlate with detection thresholds in any condition.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The participants were normal-hearing college students, not patients, so it says little about people with hearing loss or communication disorders. Musicianship was not assigned randomly; existing training and other group differences may explain the result. The advantage was found only in one planned comparison, and the overall interaction was not significant. Some musicians overcame masking on only some runs, so the effect was not consistent across the musician group. Years of training did not predict performance, so a dose-response relationship was not shown. Some adaptive runs were discarded because of high variability.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that musical training improves speech-in-noise listening for patients. This study compared existing musicians and nonmusicians in a lab word-detection task, and the advantage appeared only in one condition and was not linked to years of training.