Behavioral and subcortical signatures of musical expertise in Mandarin Chinese speakers.

Both musical training and native language have been shown to have experience-based plastic effects on auditory processing. However, the combined effects within individuals are unclear. Recent research suggests that musical training and tone language speaking are not clearly additive in their effects on processing of auditory features and that there may be a disconnect between perceptual and neural signatures of auditory feature processing. The literature has only recently begun to investigate the effects of musical expertise on basic auditory processing for different linguistic groups. This work provides a profile of primary auditory feature discrimination for Mandarin speaking musicians and nonmusicians. The musicians showed enhanced perceptual discrimination for both frequency and duration as well as enhanced duration discrimination in a multifeature discrimination task, compared to nonmusicians. However, there were no differences between the groups in duration processing of nonspeech sounds at a subcortical level or in subcortical frequency representation of a nonnative tone contour, for fo or for the first or second formant region. The results indicate that musical expertise provides a cognitive, but not subcortical, advantage in a population of Mandarin speakers.

The influence of fundamental frequency on perceived duration in spectrally comparable sounds.

The perceived duration of a sound is affected by its fundamental frequency and intensity: higher sounds are judged to be longer, as are sounds with greater intensity. Since increasing intensity lengthens the perceived duration of the auditory object, and increasing the fundamental frequency increases the sound's perceived loudness (up to ca. 3 kHz), frequency modulation of duration could be potentially explained by a confounding effect where the primary cause of the modulation would be variations in intensity. Here, a series of experiments are described that were designed to disentangle the contributions of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration to perceived loudness and duration. In two forced-choice tasks, participants judged duration and intensity differences between two sounds varying simultaneously in intensity, fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency gliding range, and duration. The results suggest that fundamental frequency and intensity each have an impact on duration judgments, while frequency gliding range did not influence the present results. We also demonstrate that the modulation of perceived duration by sound fundamental frequency cannot be fully explained by the confounding relationship between frequency and intensity.

Musical Sophistication and the Effect of Complexity on Auditory Discrimination in Finnish Speakers.

Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highly sensitive to duration cues since in Finnish, vowel and consonant duration determine word meaning. Using a correlational approach with a set of behavioral sound feature discrimination tasks, brainstem recordings, and a musical sophistication questionnaire, we find no evidence for an association between musical sophistication and more precise duration processing in Finnish speakers either in the auditory brainstem response or in behavioral tasks, but they do show an enhanced pitch discrimination compared to Finnish speakers with less musical experience and show greater duration modulation in a complex task. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect set for certain sound features which corresponds to the phonology of the native language, leaving an opportunity for music experience-based enhancement of sound features not explicitly encoded in the language (such as pitch, which is not explicitly encoded in Finnish). Finally, the pattern of duration modulation in more musically sophisticated Finnish speakers suggests integrated feature processing for greater efficiency in a real world musical situation. These results have implications for research into the specificity of plasticity in the auditory system as well as to the effects of interaction of specific language features with musical experiences.

Quantity language speakers show enhanced subcortical processing.

The complex auditory brainstem response (cABR) can reflect language-based plasticity in subcortical stages of auditory processing. It is sensitive to differences between language groups as well as stimulus properties, e.g. intensity or frequency. It is also sensitive to the synchronicity of the neural population stimulated by sound, which results in increased amplitude of wave V. Finnish is a full-fledged quantity language, in which word meaning is dependent upon duration of the vowels and consonants. Previous studies have shown that Finnish speakers have enhanced behavioural sound duration discrimination ability and larger cortical mismatch negativity (MMN) to duration change compared to German and French speakers. The next step is to find out whether these enhanced duration discrimination abilities of quantity language speakers originate at the brainstem level. Since German has a complementary quantity contrast which restricts the possible patterns of short and long vowels and consonants, the current experiment compared cABR between nonmusician Finnish and German native speakers using seven short complex stimuli. Finnish speakers had a larger cABR peak amplitude than German speakers, while the peak onset latency was only affected by stimulus intensity and spectral band. The results suggest that early cABR responses are better synchronised for Finns, which could underpin the enhanced duration sensitivity of quantity language speakers.