The Impact of Music Training on Language Perception in Older Adults Under Global Aging Challenges

Research Background

As global population aging accelerates, the decline in language perception ability of older adults in noisy environments has become a notable issue. Older adults, even with normal hearing, often encounter the “cocktail party problem,” which is the difficulty in understanding speech in multi-source environments. Studies have shown that music training can alleviate this age-related decline. However, it remains unclear whether older non-musicians and older musicians rely on functional compensation or functional preservation to resist the negative effects of aging. This study uses resting-state functional connectivity (fc) to explore the functional lateralization characteristics of older adults, i.e., the basic organizational features of the brain, and the differences in these features among older musicians (OM), older non-musicians (ONM), and young non-musicians (YNM).

Paper Information

The paper authors are Xinhu Jin, Lei Zhang, Guowei Wu, Xiuyi Wang, and Yi Du, from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Beijing Institute of Brain Science. This paper was received on November 8, 2023, accepted on February 15, 2024, and published in the journal “Neurosci. Bull.”

Research Process

The study included three main processes: 1) Recruitment and screening of participants, including 74 healthy native Chinese-speaking older and younger adults, excluding individuals with a history of psychiatric or neurological disorders. All participants had normal hearing. 2) Behavioral tests, including speech recognition tasks in noisy environments and assessments of working memory and inhibitory control. 3) Collection and analysis of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, as well as the definition and calculation of functional lateralization index (LI).

Research Results

Results showed that older musicians performed better than older non-musicians in language perception ability in both noisy and non-noisy environments, and comparable to young non-musicians. Older non-musicians showed lower lateralization levels in brain lateralization index (LI_intra) compared to young non-musicians, especially in the cingulo-opercular network (CON) and inter-hemispheric heterotopic fc (LI_he) in the language network (LAN). In contrast, older musicians showed higher neural alignment in lateralization patterns similar to young non-musicians, particularly in CON, LAN, frontoparietal network (FPN), dorsal attention network (DAN), and default mode network (DMN), suggesting that musical experience may help preserve young-like lateralization patterns.

Research Conclusions

This study highlights the different roles of functional preservation and compensatory lateralization in language perception in noisy environments for older adults, suggesting that musical skills may help mitigate age-related hearing decline in the elderly population.

Additional Information

In addition to the main content above, the authors also mentioned the support from collaborative centers for data analysis and explained the accessibility of the research data. It is worth noting that this study used resting-state fMRI as the main experimental method and focused on the brain neural mechanisms of older adults, especially brain functional lateralization under music training conditions.

This research provides a valuable perspective for understanding how older adults combat language perception challenges in noisy environments, particularly from the long-term impact of music training, offering a possible means of brain functional preservation for older adults.