Abstract

Background: In the literature, music education has been shown to enhance auditory perception for children and young adults. When compared to young adult non-musicians, young adult musicians demonstrate increased auditory processing, and enhanced sensitivity to acoustic changes. The evoked response potentials associated with the interpretation of sound are enhanced in musicians. Studies show that training also changes sound perception and cortical responses. The earlier training appears to lead to larger changes in the auditory cortex.

Aims: Most cortical studies in the literature have used pure tones or musical instrument sounds as stimuli signals. The aim of those studies was to investigate whether musical education would enhance auditory cortical responses when speech signals were used. In this study, the speech sounds extracted from running speech were used as sound stimuli.

Study Design: Non-randomized controlled study.

Methods: The experimental group consists of young adults up to 21 years-old, all with a minimum of 4 years of musical education. The control group was selected from young adults of the same age without any musical education. The experiments were conducted by using a cortical evoked potential analyser and /m/, /t/ /g/ sound stimulation at the level of 65 dB SPL. In this study, P1 / N1 / P2 amplitude and latency values were measured.

Results: Significant differences were found in the amplitude values of P1 and P2 (p<0.05). The differences among the latencies were not found to be significantly important (p>0.05).

Conclusion: The results obtained in our study indicate that musical experience has an effect on the nervous system and this can be seen in cortical auditory evoked potentials recorded when the subjects hear speech.