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Musical experience facilitates temporal analysis of speech in adult and child musicians
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Anastasia Klimovich-Gray1, Nicola Molinaro2,3, Noemi Bonfiglio2, Maria C. García-de-Soria1, Brian Mathias1, Anne Keitel4; 1University of Aberdeen, 2Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 3Ikerbasque, 4University of Dundee
Learning to play music has a profound effect on shaping the neural systems that support auditory analysis of sounds. Critically, these effects are not limited to music processing but appear to also shape auditory analysis of natural speech, highlighting adaptations to complex auditory environments through training. In two separate studies - one in young primary school children learning music and another in adult professional musicians - we explored how musical experience changes cortical tracking of auditory information in both music and speech. In both experiments participants listened to naturalistic stories and instrumental music passages while their brain activity was recorded using EEG (for children) or MEG (for adults). We captured cortical tracking of auditory information for both speech and music using cortical synchronisation measures between the neural activity and the speech/music envelopes. We focused analyses on theta (4-8Hz) and delta (0.5-4Hz) bands that in both music and speech capture cortical parsing of smaller acoustic units (in theta: syllables for speech; beat and note patterns for music) and global temporal structure (in delta: prosody and phrases for speech; meter for music). A striking finding apparent across both datasets are the differences between musically trained participants and control counterparts in the delta band. Musically trained children (n=26) showed increased delta band speech envelope tracking in the right hemisphere fronto-temporal sensors, when compared to control (n=31) groups matched on age, socio-economic status and executive function skills. No between-group differences were found in delta music passage cortical tracking or theta band tracking for either speech or music. Critically, stronger delta speech tracking in the right fronto-temporal sensors predicted better phonological skill in the whole sample. Adult musicians (n=24) likewise showed stronger delta band cortical tracking but for both speech and music passages when compared to controls (n=24), and similarly no differences in theta band tracking. For adults musical training was further associated with increased functional connectivity between auditory and motor regions while listening to speech and music. This increased connectivity, however, was not predictive of cortical tracking at the individual level. Jointly these findings suggest that delta band cortical tracking of large-scale temporal structures in the auditory input is enhanced by musical experience. Professional musicians show these effects across speech and music modalities, implying a central system for large-scale auditory temporal structure tracking which might not be directly influenced by motor regions in clear listening conditions. For primary school children with comparatively limited musical training, such effects emerge only in speech tracking and can be linked to emerging phonological proficiency.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Language Development/Acquisition