Effect of musicianship on degraded speech perception during adolescence

Musical experience is associated with speech-in-noise perception among adults, potentially due to better stream segregation, frequency encoding, and temporal encoding. The effect of musicianship on degraded speech perception is less established. To investigate the effects of musical training on speech perception performance in adolescents and young adults, we tested 10- to 23-year-olds on two noise vocoded (NV) speech perception conditions (six-band NV speech followed by silence or babble) and on the QuickSIN. A linear mixed effect model was run on noise vocoded speech perception scores with age, musical experience (in years), NV condition order, and NV condition, and all interactions as fixed effects and participant number as a random effect to account for individual variability. Because all variables interacted and contributed to performance, post hoc regression models were run. As expected, people with more musical experience showed better scores on both NV speech conditions and the QuickSIN. Word report scores on all conditions improved with development. For the hardest NV condition (babble), scores were better when participants heard the easier (silence) condition first, likely due to perceptual learning. Thus, musical experience, age, and learning all contribute to performance on degraded speech perception tasks during adolescence and young adulthood. [Work supported by NIDCD.]