Musical abilities influence the use of durational prosodic cues in spoken word recognition

Prosody plays a fundamental role in both speech and music. In spoken language, word-level local prosodic cues, such as segment duration, contribute to word recognition. This study investigated whether individual differences in musical abilities are associated with the utilization of prosodic cues during spoken word recognition, both in speech-in-quiet and speech-on-speech conditions (i.e., in the presence of competing talkers). Using the visual world paradigm, we measured listeners' gaze fixations and pupil dilations toward images depicting a referent (e.g., hamster) and a competitor word (e.g., ham), while they simultaneously listened to utterances containing the referent word, whose segment duration either matched or mismatched the referent, with the mismatched duration signaling the competitor word. Participants with varying musical backgrounds completed tasks assessing rhythmic and melodic abilities, and a questionnaire evaluating overall musical sophistication. Our results revealed that listeners with higher scores across the three measures exhibited greater sensitivity to durational cues, as indicated by increased fixations to the competitor and greater pupil dilation when the durational cue mismatched the referent word, both in speech-in-quiet and speech-on-speech. These findings highlight that individual differences in musical abilities are associated with the use of prosodic cues during spoken word recognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).