Dimensional salience varies across verbal and nonverbal domains

Information in speech and music is conveyed via multiple auditory dimensions. The informativeness of these dimensions tends to vary across domains, with pitch typically more informative for extracting musical content, and durational cues for exacting linguistic content in English speech. Some theories of sound categorization predict that informative auditory dimensions attract attention. Here we tested whether prior experience with the statistical regularities present in speech and music increase the salience of informative dimensions within a given domain. Listeners heard speech (vowel) and synthesized tone streams that varied in pitch height and sound duration at fixed rhythms. In the dimension-selective attention task, listeners attended to pitch or duration patterns and monitored for repetitions in the attended dimension. In the dimensional salience task, listeners detected amplitude oddballs while their EEG was recorded. The degree to which the brain tracked changes in each dimension provided a measure of salience. We predicted enhanced attention to systematic pitch variation for synthesized tone streams and enhanced attention to systematic duration variation for speech streams. Experiment 1 showed enhanced selective and increased cortical tracking of pitch for tone streams and duration for speech streams. Experiments 2 and 3 carefully matched speech and synthesized tones for pitch contour, harmonic range, and spectral slope and yielded a similar pattern of results, but only in non-percussionists. These findings suggest that long-term prior experience with the statistical regularities present within a domain increase the salience of informative dimensions.