Musical training sharpens and bonds ears and tongue to hear speech better

TLDR

Musical training is thought to enhance speech perception in noisy settings, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Functional MRI revealed that musicians outperform nonmusicians in syllable identification across signal‑to‑noise ratios, with stronger activation of left inferior frontal and right auditory regions, more precise phoneme representations, and enhanced intra‑ and inter‑hemispheric connectivity between auditory and speech‑motor cortices, indicating that musical training improves speech‑in‑noise perception through superior recruitment, refined phonological representations, and stronger functional coupling.

Abstract

The idea that musical training improves speech perception in challenging listening environments is appealing and of clinical importance, yet the mechanisms of any such musician advantage are not well specified. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that musicians outperformed nonmusicians in identifying syllables at varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), which was associated with stronger activation of the left inferior frontal and right auditory regions in musicians compared with nonmusicians. Moreover, musicians showed greater specificity of phoneme representations in bilateral auditory and speech motor regions (e.g., premotor cortex) at higher SNRs and in the left speech motor regions at lower SNRs, as determined by multivoxel pattern analysis. Musical training also enhanced the intrahemispheric and interhemispheric functional connectivity between auditory and speech motor regions. Our findings suggest that improved speech in noise perception in musicians relies on stronger recruitment of, finer phonological representations in, and stronger functional connectivity between auditory and frontal speech motor cortices in both hemispheres, regions involved in bottom-up spectrotemporal analyses and top-down articulatory prediction and sensorimotor integration, respectively.