| Over the past twenty years, there has been increasing interest in musicians as auditory experts. A wealth of research now documents perceptual, cognitive and neural enhancements in musicians, supporting the experience-dependent nature of the auditory system. Throughout their training, musicians gain proficiency in auditory stream segregation, which is the ability to follow a single signal embedded amidst competing sounds. In young adults, a musician's experience with stream segregation in a musical context transfers to the language domain, increasing their ability to hear speech in noise. Furthermore, musicians' advantages for hearing in noise are underscored by enhanced cognitive and neural speech-sound processing, including increased neural response resilience to the deleterious effects of background noise. Older adults, both with normal hearing and hearing loss, often report difficulties understanding speech, especially in noisy environments. This dissertation aims to determine whether young adult musicians' perceptual, cognitive and neural enhancements for hearing in noise are also present in an aging population, including older adults with and without hearing loss. Outcomes reveal that the young adult musician benefit for perceiving and neurally processing speech in noise extends to older adults, with implications for overcoming aging and hearing loss. As such, we propose music training as a potential strategy for minimizing the widespread biological, cognitive and perceptual impacts of aging and hearing loss on the human nervous system. |
