Journal Article

Inherent auditory skills rather than formal music training shape the neural encoding of speech

Bidelman, Gavin M., Mankel, Kelsey

2018

Overview

Musical training is associated with a myriad of neuroplastic changes in the brain, including more robust and efficient neural processing of clean and degraded speech signals at brainstem and cortical levels. These assumptions stem largely from cross-sectional studies between musicians and nonmusicians which cannot address whether training itself is sufficient to induce physiological changes or whether preexisting superiority in auditory function before training predisposes individuals to pursue musical interests and appear to have similar neuroplastic benefits as musicians. Here, we recorded neuroelectric brain activity to clear and noise-degraded speech sounds in individuals without formal music training but who differed in their receptive musical perceptual abilities as assessed objectively via the Profile of Music Perception Skills. We found that listeners with naturally more adept listening skills (“musical sleepers”) had enhanced frequency-following responses to speech that were also more resilient to the detrimental effects of noise, consistent with the increased fidelity of speech encoding and speech-in-noise benefits observed previously in highly trained musicians. Further comparisons between these musical sleepers and actual trained musicians suggested that experience provides an additional boost to the neural encoding and perception of speech. Collectively, our findings suggest that the auditory neuroplasticity of music engagement likely involves a layering of both preexisting (nature) and experience-driven (nurture) factors in complex sound processing. In the absence of formal training, individuals with intrinsically proficient auditory systems can exhibit musician-like auditory function that can be further shaped in an experience-dependent manner.

• Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
• Subject: Acoustics / Adult / Auditory Pathways - physiology / Auditory perception / Auditory Perception - physiology / Auditory plasticity / Auditory processing disorder / Auditory system / Biological Sciences / Brain / Brain - physiology / Brain stem / Coding / Cognitive ability / Cortex / Cross-Sectional Studies / Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Female / Humans / Information processing / Language disorders / Male / Music / Neural coding / Neural Pathways - physiology / Neuroplasticity / Noise / Perception / Psychological and Cognitive Sciences / Signal processing / Skills / Sound processing / Speech / Speech perception / Speech Perception - physiology / Speech sounds / Teaching / Training / Young Adult