Neural Correlates of the Musicianship Advantage to the Cocktail Party Effect

Prior research has indicated that musicians show an auditory processing advantage in phonemic processing of language. The aim of the current study was to elucidate when in the auditory cortical processing stream this advantage emerges in a cocktail-party-like environment. Participants (n = 34) were aged 18-35 years and deemed to be either a musician (10+ years experience) or nonmusician (no formal training). EEG data were collected while participants were engaged in a phoneme discrimination task. During the task, participants were asked to discern auditory "ba" and "pa" phonemes in two conditions: one with competing speech (target with distractor [TD]) and one without competing speech (target only). Behavioral results showed that musicians discriminated phonemes better under the TD condition than nonmusicians, whereas no performance differences were observed during the target only condition. Analysis of the EEG ERP showed musicianship-based differences at both early (N1) and late (P3) processing stages during the TD condition. Specifically, musicians exhibited decreased neural activity during the N1 and increased neural activity during the P3. Source localization of the P3 showed that musicians increased activity in the right superior/middle temporal gyrus. Results from this study indicate that musicians have a phonemic processing advantage specifically when presented in the context of distraction, which arises from a shift in neural activity from early (N1) to late (P3) stages of cortical phonemic processing.