Do musicians speak differently? Preliminary results of a production study

Previous research has shown that professional musicians demonstrate superior auditory skills in a range of psychoacoustic and musically related auditory tasks. This heightened acuity has been shown to carry over to speech-oriented auditory tasks. Here, however, we set out to examine whether a strong musical background affects speech production, specifically, in expressing contrastive narrow focus when answering a question. Eight musicians and eight non-musicians were recorded answering 24 questions by 4-word sentences with an elicited narrow focus on one of the words. The productions were evaluated by two panels of listeners (experienced and inexperienced) who were asked to judge whether a specific word was emphasized in each utterance, and to what degree. Results showed a significant difference in judgments between the two groups of listeners, and a significant interaction with word position within the utterance. Regardless of listening group and word position, a consistent trend was observed; emphasis was judged stronger for musicians, although the difference was not statistically significant. We ascribe the lack of significance mainly to the small sample size, and intend to extend the study.