Effects of musical experience and sentence difficulty on noisy speech recognition in second language learners

Correctly recognizing second-language speech in a noisy environment is a difficult task for second-language learners. Early works have indicated the beneficial effects of musical training in native language acquisition and development. However, how musical training experiences influence second-language speech-in-noise (SIN) recognition in second-language learners remains unknown. To examine this question, we recruited 78 right-handed young adults who spoke English as their second language and showed different musical training experiences over the past 10 years and employed an English SIN test in which two factors were manipulated, signal-to-noise ratio level (SNR; quiet, + 5 dB, −5 dB) and sentence difficulty (easy, hard). The percentage of words correctly identified from sentences was used in the data analyses. The results revealed a significant interaction between musical training experience, SNR level, and sentence difficulty. Further analyses found that the long musical training group outperformed the short musical training group in identifying hard sentences from noise. Overall, these results provide new evidence for the benefits of music training experiences for SIN recognition in the context of second language learning. [Work supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Ministry of Education of China 20YJCZH079.]