Using functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques, it is found that music training can promote the improvement of human speech perception.

Music and language are the products of human consciousness, which have a profound impact on the survival and development of human society.
there are some similar elements, organizational principles, and some basic neural loops and processing mechanisms.
for a long time, the relationship between music, language and the brain has attracted many cognitive neuroscience and psychologists to explore and the public attention.
speech as the voice carrier of language, its perception and understanding is an important function of human brain, affecting people's daily communication.
and the daily environment is often full of noise, and the decline in speech perception under noise can cause great disruption to social activities, especially among older people whose hearing function declines as they get older.
in terms of improved speech perception, a number of studies have shown that music training can improve people's speech perception in noisy environment.
but the specific neural mechanisms that musical training has led to the improvement of speech perception have not yet been clarified.
, in cooperation with McGill University in Canada, the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Sciences of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found that music training can not only improve the hearing coding ability of speech from the bottom up, the ability of top-down speech motion prediction, but also strengthen the cross-modal information integration of auditory-motion system;
the study recruited 15 musicians with an average age of 22 (training startage age less than 7 years, total training duration greater than 10 years, and more than 3 hours per week) and non-musicians, and balanced the subjects' demographic characteristics (gender, age, education), hearing level, hearing memory and nonverbal IQ.
the experiment, two groups of subjects changed their blood oxygen levels when syllables were identified at different background noise intensity.
found that musicians were more verbally recognizable than non-musicians in noise-disturbed rather than quiet situations.
, musicians showed greater activation in the left frontal speech brain region of the broca region, such as the upper temporal motor region of the right, and the upper and middle-back of the right, and the activation levels of these two brain regions were positively correlated with the musician's syllable recognition scores.
further studies on magnetic resonance imaging data using polypherotin pattern classification algorithms to assess how music training affects specific coding and characterization of speech stimulation in the brain.
results showed that musicians showed greater differentiation between neural reaction patterns of different pitches (the elements that make up the syllables) characteristics than non-musicians in the speech regionof the two-sided frontal lobes and the auditory region of the temporal lobe, and with the increase of noise intensity, the left speech movement area contributed more to the improvement of the musician's performance than the auditory region.
functional connection analysis found that the musician's two-sided auditory area (including the back of the upper temporal and the catafacial plane) is more functionally connected to the same side or side moving area (such as the abdominal and back side frontal motor cortex), while the left speech motion area's ability to distinguish the sound position and the functional connection strength of the right hearing area and the right speech movement area can positively predict the syllable recognition score of the subject.
the study, music training can strengthen the auditory coding of speech stimulation, motion coding and information integration between auditory-motion systems, the three mechanisms can be based on the dynamic changes of hearing difficulty to promote speech perception in the noise environment with different weights, from a new perspective to analyze the music training to strengthen speech processing of the brain mechanism.
conclusions have clinical value and application prospect for music training to improve speech perception in the elderly groups and people with hearing and speech impairments.
research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and is recommended as a key article in the "In This Issue" section of the current printed volume.
the study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National "Thousand People Program" Youth Program, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Foundation.
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