Musical experience during childhood profoundly influences how the brain processes sound, even with just one year of training. Enhancements in musicians' brains often relate to the very neural impairments seen in children with language, learning and literacy disorders. Musical experience might therefore boost impaired systems in children with such disorders. Little is known about how musical experience brings about changes in the brain and about how these changes relate with behaviors such as language, learning and literacy. With support from the National Science Foundation, Nina Kraus and her laboratory will provide initial evidence for musical training's impact on both cortical and subcortical auditory processing in children and adults, defining the roles different parts of the brain play in shaping cognitive and perceptual capabilities related to language, learning and literacy. To accomplish this work, the researchers will recruit musician and non-musician participants from 3 to 35 years of age and assess them at three age groups, with child musicians recruited in collaboration with Chicago's Suzuki-Orff School of Music. Using scalp electrodes, the researchers record brain responses to speech and music sounds from both the auditory brainstem and the cortex. Electrodes are also used to measure auditory attention in the brain while participants are asked to listen to a spoken story and ignore competing sounds. Participants additionally complete listening and learning tests by which researchers assess cognitive and perceptual abilities and relate them with brain activity.
This work has the capacity to explain how brain changes occur with musical experience in the auditory system and to define relationships these changes have with language, literacy and attention. Understanding of the cognitive benefits of music could influence public policy regarding music education and music therapy. Outcomes of this project will also expand clinicians' toolkits for addressing language, literacy and attention disorders in addition to influencing policy-makers to incorporate music into classrooms, particularly for schools with at-risk children demonstrating high concentrations of language, learning and literacy disorders. The principal investigator has established a track record of broadly disseminating findings to the research community and the public, and expects new findings to be further translated into practice on an international scale.
In this project we assessed how musical experience influences auditory brain function from the brainstem to the cortex, across three different age groups. We examined the neural encoding of speech and music sounds as well as assessing cognitive and perceptual capabilities. Outcomes indicate that musical training profoundly shapes how the brain interacts with sound. By assessing subgroups of musical experts, we provide evidence that neural processing is tuned to the specific characteristics of a musician’s own instrument. Further, assessment of adults who had limited musical experience during childhood showed that even a small amount of musical training can cause changes in the neural processing of sound, and that the extent of this change relates to the amount of musical experience. Taken together, these findings support the conclusion that the enhanced neural processing of sound in musicians compared with non-musicians is at least in part due to their musical training rather than simply a result of pre-existing differences. Musicians’ advantages for processing speech in noise are shown to be present during pivotal developmental years. Supported by correlations between auditory working memory, attention and auditory brainstem response properties, we propose that musicians’ perceptual and neural enhancements are driven in a top-down manner by the strengthening of cognitive abilities with training. We found that young children with just a few years of musical training have more precise neural representations of speech sounds, which enables discrimination between consonants and is important for speech perception and reading. The extent of this neural precision relates with auditory cognitive abilities such as auditory working memory and attention. We also demonstrate that neural processing of sound can be mediated by high-level characteristics such as whether the sound fits into a regular pattern or rhythmical structure, and that the extent of this effect may relate with musical aptitude and reading skills. We provide evidence for strengthened brain networks for selective auditory attention in musicians, with attention having a greater stabilizing effect on cortical responses in musicians compared with non-musicians. Musicians’ neural proficiency for selectively engaging and sustaining auditory attention to language indicates a potential benefit of music for auditory training. Our findings also include evidence that auditory brainstem function has a genetic factor, since siblings were found to have more similar neural responses than age- and sex-matched pairs, and reading matched pairs. Our research has led toward understanding the developmental impact of musical training on the nervous system—largely with regard to cognitive and sensory sound processing. These findings provide evidence to support the important role of auditory cognitive function in shaping neural function, with musical training providing one mechanism by which these skills may be enhanced. Additionally, outcomes provide evidence that the observed differences between musicians and non-musicians are not purely the result of innate predispositions, even limited musical training during childhood led to observable changes in the neural processing of sound. Our data document neural influences of musical training on the neural processing of speech and music sounds. Our data also show that musical training enhances neural encoding of speech and music in the very ways that children with a variety of language and literacy disorders show deficits. Based on our results, musical training may aid in the prevention, habilitation, and remediation of individuals with a wide range of attention-based language, listening and learning impairments. Such disorders are a huge liability to our society that inordinately affects underrepresented minorities. These findings promote music as an activity that has the capacity to strengthen neural encoding early in the processing stream. Additionally, individuals studying the neurobiology and effective remediation of auditory processing deficits may benefit from our findings through application of musical training principles to remediation efforts. Our work has been well received by educators interested in the biological impact of music education in schools, and clinicians seeking more effective treatments for children with language and literacy impairment.
