Musicians upweight pitch during prosodic categorization

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 acoustic 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 acoustic dimensions leads that dimension to attract attention. Therefore, 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. In Experiment 2, we 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. In this experiment, 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 only, musicians up-weighted pitch compared to non-musicians. These results suggest that musical training is linked with domain-general enhancements of the salience of pitch cues, and that this increase in pitch salience may lead to to an up-weighting of pitch during some prosodic categorization tasks. These findings also support attentional theories of cue weighting, in which more salient acoustic dimensions are given more importance during speech categorization.