The Effects of Musical Training on Speech Detection in the Presence of Informational and Energetic Masking

Recent research has suggested that musicians have an advantage in some speech-in-noise paradigms, but not all. Whether musicians outperform nonmusicians on a given speech-in-noise task may well depend on the type of noise involved. To date, few groups have specifically studied the role that informational masking plays in the observation of a musician advantage. The current study investigated the effect of musicianship on listeners' ability to overcome informational versus energetic masking of speech. Monosyllabic words were presented in four conditions that created similar energetic masking but either high or low informational masking. Two of these conditions used noise-vocoded target and masking stimuli to determine whether the absence of natural fine structure and spectral variations influenced any musician advantage. Forty young normal-hearing listeners (20 musicians and 20 nonmusicians) completed the study. There was a significant overall effect of participant group collapsing across the four conditions; however, planned comparisons showed musicians' thresholds were only significantly better in the high informational masking natural speech condition, where the musician advantage was approximately 3 dB. These results add to the mounting evidence that informational masking plays a role in the presence and amount of musician benefit.