Musical experience is linked to enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch and increased primary weighting during suprasegmental categorization

Symons, Ashley E; Tierney, Adam · 2021 · Crossref

DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/c4396

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Summary

This study investigates how musical training influences individual differences in speech perception, specifically regarding how listeners weight acoustic cues during prosodic categorization. Speech perception requires integrating redundant acoustic dimensions, yet listeners vary in the weight they assign to specific cues. The authors test attentional theories of cue weighting, which propose that prior experience with a dimension’s task-relevance increases its perceptual salience and likelihood of capturing attention. Building on the OPERA hypothesis, the researchers hypothesized that musicians, who repeatedly direct selective attention to pitch in music, would exhibit enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch and consequently upweight pitch cues during speech categorization compared to nonmusicians. The research comprised two experiments involving 82 native English speakers, divided into musicians (≥6 years of experience) and nonmusicians (0 years). Experiment 1 assessed dimension-selective attention using speech stimuli where pitch and loudness varied orthogonally. Participants judged which word in a phrase was higher in pitch or louder, ignoring the irrelevant dimension. Experiment 2 examined prosodic cue weighting by having participants categorize linguistic focus and phrase boundaries in stimuli where pitch and duration provided conflicting cues. Logistic regression models analyzed accuracy in Experiment 1 and categorization choices in Experiment 2 to determine cue weighting strategies. Results from Experiment 1 revealed that musicians demonstrated significantly enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch compared to nonmusicians, particularly when pitch differences were large. However, musicians did not show inferior performance in attending to loudness, suggesting a domain-general enhancement in controlling attention to pitch rather than an involuntary capture of attention by pitch. In Experiment 2, musicians upweighted pitch cues relative to nonmusicians during linguistic focus categorization. Conversely, during phrase boundary categorization, musicians upweighted duration cues relative to nonmusicians. These findings indicate that musical experience is linked to a perceptual strategy that relies more heavily on a single primary dimension, whereas nonmusicians tend to integrate across multiple dimensions. The study concludes that musical training leads to domain-general enhancements in the ability to selectively attend to specific acoustic dimensions, particularly pitch. This supports attentional theories of cue weighting, demonstrating that experience directing attention to a dimension increases its salience and subsequent weighting during categorization tasks. The results imply that the "musician advantage" in speech perception may stem from specialized attentional control mechanisms developed through musical practice, allowing musicians to prioritize specific acoustic cues more effectively than nonmusicians.

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• auditory