Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Musical Training Influences Auditory Temporal Processing, Saravanan Elangovan, Nicole Payne, Jacek Smurzynski, Marc A. Fagelson

ETSU Faculty Works

Background: A link between musical expertise and auditory temporal processing abilities was examined.

Material and methods: Trained musicians (n=13) and non-musicians (n=12) were tested on speech tasks (phonetic identification, speech recognition in noise) and non-speech tasks (temporal gap detection).

Results: Results indicated musicians had shorter between-channel gap detection thresholds and sharper phonetic identification functions, suggesting that perceptual reorganization following musical training assists basic temporal auditory processes.

Conclusions: In general, our results provide a conceptual advance in understanding how musical training influences speech processing, an ability which, when impaired, can affect speech and reading competency.

Military Trauma And Its Influence On Loudness Perception, Marc A. Fagelson

ETSU Faculty Works

Excerpt: It is often the case that veterans who experience hyperacusis have hearing loss and tinnitus; what sets the patient with PTSD apart is an increased likelihood that will rate sound tolerance problems as more severe than tinnitus and hearing loss.