Effects of reverberation on brainstem representation of speech in musicians and non-musicians.

ABSTRACT: Perceptual and neurophysiological enhancements in linguistic processing in musicians suggest that domain specific experience may enhance neural resources recruited for language specific behaviors. In everyday situations, listeners are faced with extracting speech signals in degraded listening conditions. Here, we examine whether musical training provides resilience to the degradative effects of reverberation on subcortical representations of pitch and formant-related harmonic information of speech. Brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) were recorded from musicians and non-musician controls in response to the vowel /i/ in four different levels of reverberation and analyzed based on their spectro-temporal composition. For both groups, reverberation had little effect on the neural en

SUBMITTER: Bidelman GM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2939203 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature