Previous research has shown that musical training can lead to differences in certain neural responses to auditory stimuli. In particular, musicians were found to exhibit stronger subcortical responses to speech sounds than non-musicians. Among these responses is the frequency-following response at the fundamental frequency of a speech signal (speech-FFR). However, the speech-FFR exhibits not only a subcortical, but also a cortical component. It remains unclear whether the cortical component of the speech-FFR may be influenced by musical experience as well. Moreover, we recently showed that the cortical component is modulated by selective attention (Schüller et al., J. Neurosci. 43:7429, 2023), but whether this attentional modulation is subject to musical training has not yet been studied.

In this study, we acquired magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings to investigate the cortical contribution to the speech-FFR in 52 participants with varying levels of musical expertise. Participants were presented with two audiobooks from different speakers, with instructions to selectively attend to one while disregarding the other. We analyzed the data by computing temporal response functions (TRFs) to examine the source-reconstructed activity in the auditory cortex, specifically focusing on two acoustic features related to the fundamental frequency of speech, which characterize the speech-FFR.

Our findings revealed significant differences in attentional modulation for both acoustic features, consistent with our prior research. However, we observed no modulation of the responses based on musical training. Both musicians and non-musicians exhibited similar cortical contributions to the speech-FFR. Furthermore, the attentional modulation observed was not influenced by musical training. Our results suggest that the subcortical and cortical contribution to the speech-FFR play at least partly different roles in speech processing.