Music training is associated with better clause segmentation during spoken language processing

Abstract

Musical expertise is known to affect speech perception at units below clause/sentence. This study investigated whether the musician’s advantage extends to a higher and more central level of speech processing (i.e., clause segmentation). Two groups of participants (musician vs. nonmusician) were presented with sentences that contain an internal clause boundary. The acoustic correlates of the boundary were manipulated in six conditions: all-cue, pause-only, final-lengthening-only, pitch-reset-only, pause-and-final-lengthening-in-combination, and no-cue conditions. Participants were asked to judge whether the sentence they heard had an internal boundary. Results showed that the musicians detected more boundaries than the nonmusicians in the all-cue and the pause-only conditions, but fewer boundaries in the no-cue condition. Further analyses of cue weight showed that both musicians and nonmusicians placed more importance on pause than the other two cues, but this weighting bias was more pronounced for the musicians. These results suggest that music training is associated with increased perceptual acuity not only to the acoustic markings of speech boundaries but also to the weighting of the cues. Our findings extend the role of musical expertise to sentence-level speech processing.