Comparison of the recognition scores of stop and fricative consonants in babble noise between musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

Everyday communication mostly occurs in the presence of various background noises and competing talkers. Studies have shown that musical training could have a positive effect on auditory processing, particularly in challenging listening situations. To our knowledge, no groups have specifically studied the advantage of musical training on perception of consonants in the presence of background noise. We hypothesized that musician advantage in speech in noise processing may also result in enhanced perception of speech units such as consonants in noise. Therefore, this study aimed to compare the recognition of stops and fricatives, which constitute the highest number of Persian consonants, in the presence of 12-talker babble noise between musicians and non-musicians. For this purpose, stops and fricatives presented in the consonant-vowel-consonant format and embedded in three signal-to-noise ratios of 0, −5, and −10 dB. The study was conducted on 40 young listeners (20 musicians and 20 non-musicians) with normal hearing. Our outcome indicated that musicians outperformed the non-musicians in recognition of stops and fricatives in all three signal-to-noise ratios. These findings provide important evidence about the impact of musical instruction on processing of consonants and highlight the role of musical training on perceptual abilities.