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

Symons, Ashley and Tierney, Adam (2023) Musical experience is linked to enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch and increased primary weighting during suprasegmental categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , ISSN 0278-7393.

Abstract

Speech perception requires the integration of evidence from acoustic cues across multiple dimensions. Individuals differ in their cue weighting strategies, i.e. the weight they assign to different dimensions during speech categorization. In two experiments, we investigate musical training as one potential predictor of individual differences in prosodic cue weighting strategies. Attentional theories of speech categorization suggest that prior experience with the task-relevance of a particular dimension leads that dimension to attract attention. Experiment 1 tested whether musicians and non-musicians differed in their ability to selectively attend to pitch and loudness in speech. Compared to non-musicians, musicians showed enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch but not loudness. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that musicians would show greater pitch weighting during prosodic categorization due to prior experience with the task-relevance of pitch cues in music. Listeners categorized phrases that varied in the extent to which pitch and duration signaled the location of linguistic focus and phrase boundaries. During linguistic focus categorization, musicians upweighted pitch compared to non-musicians. During phrase boundary categorization, musicians upweighted duration relative to non-musicians. These results suggest that musical experience is linked with domain-general enhancements in the ability to selectively attend to certain acoustic dimensions in speech. As a result, musicians may place greater perceptual weight on a single primary dimension during prosodic categorization, while non-musicians may be more likely to choose a perceptual strategy which integrates across multiple dimensions. These findings support attentional theories of cue weighting, which suggest attention influences listeners’ perceptual weighting of acoustic dimensions during categorization.

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