Performance advantages associated with music training extend to tasks that require participants to judge whether a sentence’s final word is pronounced correctly or to identify the emotions conveyed by an infant’s cry or by prosody in speech. Even 9-year-olds with 4 years of music lessons are better than their untrained counterparts at discriminating syllables that vary in pitch or duration. Musically trained individuals also exhibit processing advantages for aspects of speech that have no obvious counterpart in music. For example, music training predicts enhanced sensitivity to phonemic contrasts, whether such sensitivity is measured as preschoolers’ brain-stem responses or adults’ discrimination abilities. Other findings show that musically trained deaf children (with hearing aids or cochlear implants) have enhanced performance on tests that require them to discriminate phonemes or to segregate auditory streams; Indian children with music training have better comprehension of spoken English whether they are trained in Western or Indian classical music; adult musicians exhibit advantages at perceiving speech that has been degraded spectrally; and string players have enhanced pre attentive neural encoding of vowels that vary infrequency , duration, formant transition, or voice-onset time.