Exploring the role of singing, semantics, and amusia screening in speech-in-noise perception in musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

Sentence repetition has been the focus of extensive psycholinguistic research. The notion that music training can bolster speech perception in adverse auditory conditions has been met with mixed results. In this work, we sought to gauge the effect of babble noise on immediate repetition of spoken and sung phrases of varying semantic content (expository, narrative, and anomalous), initially in 100 English-speaking monolinguals with and without music training. The two cohorts also completed some non-musical cognitive tests and the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA). When disregarding MBEA results, musicians were found to significantly outperform non-musicians in terms of overall repetition accuracy. Sung targets were recalled significantly better than spoken ones across groups in the presence of babble noise. Sung expository targets were recalled better than spoken expository ones, and semantically anomalous content was recalled more poorly in noise. Rerunning the analysis after eliminating thirteen participants who were diagnosed with amusia showed no significant group differences. This suggests that the notion of enhanced speech perception-in noise or otherwise-in musicians needs to be evaluated with caution. Musicianship aside, this study showed for the first time that sung targets presented in babble noise seem to be recalled better than spoken ones. We discuss the present design and the methodological approach of screening for amusia as factors which may partially account for some of the mixed results in the field.

Keywords: Amusia; Music training; Semantics; Sentence repetition; Singing; Speech perception in noise.

Fig. 1

Boxplots showing performance of musicians and non-musicians on all trials of the speech condition. Higher scores reflect higher accuracy. The whisker boxes show the median (thick horizontal line) and the quartiles

Fig. 2

Performance of musicians and non-musicians on all trials of the song condition. The boxplots show the distribution of the data including the median and the quartiles

Fig. 3

Correlation between years of training and overall performance on the MBEA (r = 0.40, p < 0.001). Note that training indicates the total years of music training a participant had taken, with more instruments adding up to a larger value

Fig. 4

Performance of amusic participants and controls on all trials of the speech condition. The boxplots show the distribution of the data including the median and the quartiles

Fig. 5

Performance of amusic participants and controls on all trials of the song condition. The boxplots display summary statistics including the median and the quartiles