PROCEEDINGS of the23rd International Congress on Acoustics
9 to 13 September 2019 in Aachen, Germany

Differences in Speech-on-Speech Processing Between Musiciansand Non-Musicians: The Role of Durational Cues
Elif Canseza Kaplan1; Deniz Başkent2; Anita E. Wagner 31

Research School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Universityof Groningen, Netherlands

2

Department of Otorhinolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, University Medical Center Groningen, Universityof Groningen, Netherlands

ABSTRACTIn the current study, we investigate the role of prosodic cues in speech-on-speech perception in musicians
and non-musicians. Earlier studies have shown that musically experienced listeners may have an advantage
in speech-on-speech performance in behavioral tasks (1,2). Previously, we have also shown in an eyetracking study that musical experience has an effect on the timing of resolution of lexical competition whenprocessing quiet vs masked speech (3). In particular, musicians were faster in lexical decision-making whena two-talker masker was added to target speech. However, the source of the difference observed between
groups remained unclear. In the current study, by employing a visual world paradigm, we aim to clarify
whether musicians make use of durational cues that contribute to prosodic boundaries in Dutch, in resolving
lexical competition when processing quiet vs two-talker masked speech. If musical training preserves
listeners' sensitivity to the acoustic correlates of prosodic boundaries when processing masked speech, we
expect to observe more lexical competition and delayed lexical resolution in musicians. We will compare
gaze-tracking and pupil data of both groups across conditions.
Keywords: speech-on-speech, cocktail-party effect, musical training, eye-tracking, pupillometry

1. INTRODUCTION
Musical training has been shown to have a positive effect in understanding speech in a competingtalker(s) situation (1–3), also known as the cocktail-party phenomenon (4). Previously, we employed
the visual world paradigm (5,6) to investigate whether the processing of speech masked by competing
speakers differs between musicians and non-musicians (3). Our results indicated that musicians werefaster in terms of resolving the lexical ambiguity and the speech masking engaged their attentiondifferently. However, it remained unclear whether this positive effect of musical experience is due tomusicians being better able to suppress the maskers or being more sensitive to the acoustic cues thatmatter in making the distinction between two words that are phonologically similar in their onset
Speech comprehension involves resolving lexical competitions between phonologically similar
items and acoustic ambiguities resolves as the speech signal unfolds in time. Durational cues that
contribute to prosodic boundaries in Dutch are known to play a role in resolving this lexical
ambiguities (7). For instance, onset-embedded words such as, ham/hamster that share the initialsyllable have inherently different durational properties in the first syllable. In the current study, weaimed to investigate whether these cues that enable the resolution of lexical competition, as they havebeen shown to play a role in quiet speech (7), are picked up differently by musicians and non-5756

1

e.c.kaplan@rug.nl

2d.baskent@umcg.nl

3

a.wagner@umcg.nl

musicians when speech is presented within a two-talker masker. We embedded monosyllabic words(ham) in polysyllabic ones (hamster), which in turn generated words containing longer syllables inspliced (ham+ster) words. Thus, there were durationally matching (hamster) or mismatching(ham+ster) target words, either presented without maskers in quiet, or within two-talker maskers. We
measured participants’ eye-movements and changes in pupil dilation to capture the attention and effort
induced by masking. If musically experienced individuals are more attentive to these durational cues
despite the background noise, they are expected to exhibit more lexi cal competition and a delay in thelexical resolution when the durational cues are mismatching as opposed to the matching condition.

2. METHOD
2.1 Participants
Twenty-five musically trained and twenty-six non-musician listeners with normal hearing
participated in the study. The criteria for having normal hearing involved having less than 25 dB HL
pure tone thresholds between 250 to 4000 Hz bilaterally. Musician criteria were based on the literature(8) to be: having more at least 10 years of training, having started music at/before the age of 7 andactively making music within the past 3 years, prior to the study.
2.2 Materials
For target sentences, we used twenty-six semantically neutral Dutch sentences, containing apolysyllabic target word (i.e., hamster) that enable the embedding of a monosyllabic word (i.e., ham).
The recordings consisted of utterances of a Dutch female speaker without any regional accent (see (9)for details). The monosyllabic recordings were embedded in the polysyllabic ones to gener ate thetarget mismatching duration conditions.
The masker sentence set was taken from another corpus (10) and consisted of meaningful Dutch
sentences, uttered by a female speaker without any regional accent. The same female speaker’s voice
was used to generate the two-talker maskers. The target speaker’s utterances were embedded within
two-talker masker, such that the onset of the target speaker’s utterance was 500 ms after the onset ofthe maskers’ utterance. Also, the maskers ended 500 ms after the offset of the utterance of the target
speaker. If the duration of a single sentence of the masker was not sufficient to go beyond the extra
500 ms, another sentence was randomly chosen and added to the signal. All sentences were generated
offline before the experiment. All sentences were presented at the same level of intensity, whether
masked or quiet, of 70 dB SPL.
Additionally, black and white pictures were created to be used in the visual world paradigm. The
images consisted of the pictures that referred to the target words (hamster), phonological competitors(ham) and the semantically or phonologically unrelated distractors (box).
2.3 Procedure
All participants initially underwent audiometric check. Those with normal hearing proceeded withthe experiment. Following these initial tests, the experiment took place in two parts. In the first part,
participants were shown the pictures utilized in the experiment and asked to name them.
Experimenters made sure the pictures were referred as the same as used in the experiment. Then, theeye-tracker was calibrated.
The second part of the experiment had two blocks: in the first block, participants listened to thetarget speaker in quiet and the second block was consisted of the masked condition. The order ofpresentation of the blocks was always constant, since in the quiet block, participants were familiarizedwith the voice of the target speaker. Each block contained target matching and mismatching duration
condition words. Before each list started, participants completed four practice trials. In each trial,
participants initially saw a cross in the middle of the screen, which was followed by the simultaneouspresentation of the audio and visual information. Participants were asked to pay attention to the target
speaker’s utterances and choose the image that they heard in the utterance, from the four images
displayed on the screen. Their gaze fixations to th e four images, as well as the pupil dilations wererecorded.

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3. RESULTS
The gaze fixations revealed that in the target matching duration condition, both groups performed
similarly in terms of timing of lexical resolution. There was a slight delay for both g roups in themasked condition of target matching duration condition. In the target mismatching duration condition,
the timing of lexical resolution was delayed for both groups, but it was more so for the musicallytrained group. Both in quiet and masked speech, musically trained listeners exhibited more lexicalcompetition and a delay in resolving the lexical ambiguity.

4. CONCLUSIONSThe target matching duration condition’s results were in line with our previous findings, where weobserved a delay in timing of lexical ambiguity when masking was added to the speech signal (3). In
the target mismatching duration condition, musicians appeared to be affect ed more by themismatching duration than non-musicians, suggesting that they may be more sensitive to thedurational prosodic cues despite the speech maskers. Both groups were affected by the speech masker,indicated by the delay in lexical decision-making; however, non-musician group appeared to be lessaffected by the duration manipulation both in quiet and in masked speech. Results will be analyzed
employing growth curve analysis, which captures how the gaze fixation curves differ across time
between groups and conditions. Additionally, pupil responses are still being processed for furtheranalysis.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank our BCN master’s student assistant Joëlle Jagersma for assisting the datacollection. This project was supported by funding from the EUs H2020 research and innovation
programme under the MSCA GA 67532*4 (the ENRICH network: www.enrich-etn.eu), and the secondand last authors were supported by a VICI Grant (No. 016.VICI.170.111) from the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Netherlands Organization for Health Researchand Development (ZonMw).

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