Learning and practising a musical instrument has
recently been thought to ‘train’ the brain into processing sound
in a more refined manner.As a result, musicians experiencing
consistent exposure to musical practice have been suspected
to have superior auditory processing skills. This study aimed
to investigate this phenomenon within the Maltese context,
by testing two cohorts of young Maltese adults. Participants
in the musician cohort experienced consistent musical training
throughout their lifetime, while those in the non-musician
cohort did not have a history of musical training. A total of
24 Maltese speakers (14 musicians and 10 non-musicians) of
ages ranging between 19 and 31 years were tested for Frequency
Discrimination (FD), Duration Discrimination (DD), Temporal
Resolution (TR) and speech-in-noise recognition. The main
outcomes yielded by each cohort were compared and analysed
statistically. In comparison to the non-musician cohort, the
musicians performed in a slightly better manner throughout
testing. Statistical superiority was surprisingly only present in
the FD test. Although musicians displayed a degree of superiority
in performance on the other tests, differences in mean scores
were not statistically significant. The results yielded by this investigation
are to a degree coherent with implications of previous
research, in that the effect of long-term musical experience on
the trained cohort manifested itself in a slight superiority in performance
on auditory processing tasks. However, this difference
in scoring was not prominent enough to be statistically significant.peer-reviewe
