Musician Advantage for Segregation of Competing Speech in Native Tonal Language Speakers

The aim of this study was to replicate previous English-language musician advantage studies in Mandarin-speaking musicians and nonmusicians. Segregation of competing speech, melodic pitch perception, and spectro-temporal pattern perception were measured in normal-hearing native Mandarin-speaking musicians and nonmusicians. Speech recognition thresholds were measured in the presence of two-talker masker speech. The masker sex was either the same as or different from the target; target and masker speech were either co-located or spatially separated. Melodic pitch perception was tested using a melodic contour identification task. Spectro-temporal resolution was measured using a modified spectral ripple detection task. We hypothesized that, given musician advantages in pitch perception, musician effects would be larger when the target and masker sex was the same than when different. For all tests, performance was significantly better for musicians than for nonmusicians. Contrary to our expectation, larger musician effects were observed for segregation of competing speech when the target and masker sex was different. The results show that musician effects observed for non-tonal language speakers extend to tonal language speakers. The data also suggest that musician effects may depend on the difficulty of the listening task and may be reduced when listening tasks are too easy or too difficult.