A study on the relationship between musical ability and EFL pronunciation proficiency

Kaszycka, Mariola

doi:10.31743/lingbaw.13453

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 27 publications

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“…There are many studies confirming that subjects with both higher musicality and more intensive musical training performed better with regard to pronunciation in the second language (e.g. Milovanov et al 2008Milovanov et al , 2010Pastuszek-Lipińska 2008, Kaszycka 2021. Learning a foreign language through music is also an area of scientific investigation, e.g.…”

Section: Musicality and Language Learning Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language and Music: Designing a Course at an Academic Level

Gralińska-Brawata

2023

RiL

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The parallels that are present between language and music, together with popular beliefs that musicality may be a factor enhancing language learning, especially with regard to pronunciation, prompted the idea of designing an academic course whose main aim was to demonstrate the relation between the two domains from the linguistic perspective. There were eighteen students participating in the course which was an elective for 1st year MA students of English at the University of Łódź. The course content included presentation of direct links between language and music, and of selected studies indicating the influence of music on developing various aspects of linguistic performance, e.g. second language learning (e.g. Pastuszek-Lipińska, 2008; Kolinsky et al., 2009), early reading abilities (Fonseca-Mora et al., 2018) or pitch processing (Besson et al., 2007). The practical part of the course involved testing the students' musical abilities with the use of various tools: tests available online and a sample of a music school entrance exam (based on Rybińska et al., 2016). The participants completed tasks related to their English speech performance, i.e. recording the passage The North Wind and the Sun and analysing their English speech production with the use of acoustic speech analysis software (Praat) in order to learn about the ways in which they could explore the possible links between their musicality and performance in L2 English. The majority of students claimed that they had not been aware of the degree of interplay between language and music, and had overestimated their musical abilities prior to taking the tests, but they saw the potential of music training not only in language learning, but other spheres of human activity.

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Section: Musicality and Language Learning Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language and Music: Designing a Course at an Academic Level

Gralińska-Brawata

2023

RiL

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What Is “Music” in Music-to-Language Transfer? Musical Ability But Not Musicianship Supports Cantonese Listeners' English Stress Perception

Choi

2022

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: This study investigates how Cantonese language experience influences the potential effects of (a) musicianship and (b) musical ability on English stress perception. Method: The sample contained 124 participants, evenly split into Cantonese musician, Cantonese nonmusician, English musician, and English nonmusician groups. They completed the English stress discrimination task, English stress sequence recall task, Musical Ear Test, and nonverbal intelligence task. Following the musicianship-based analysis, 44 Cantonese and English listeners were reassigned to four groups based on their musical ability—Cantonese high musical ability, Cantonese low musical ability, English high musical ability, and English low musical ability groups. Results: Musicianship-based analysis on English stress perception revealed a significant interaction between musicianship and language. Specifically, musicians outperformed nonmusicians only among the English but not the Cantonese listeners. By contrast, ability-based analysis showed significant main effects of musical ability and language. For both Cantonese and English listeners, those with a high musical ability outperformed those with a low musical ability. Regardless of musical ability, Cantonese listeners outperformed English listeners. Correlational analyses yielded consistent findings. Conclusions: This study has found cross-sectional evidence that musical ability, but not musicianship, facilitates Cantonese English as a second language (ESL) listeners' English stress perception. From a theoretical perspective, the current findings motivate two potential additions to the OPERA (Overlap, Precision, Emotion, Repetition, and Attention) hypothesis for music-to-language transfer—unsaturation and utilization. Practically, the findings cast doubt on the application of nonperceptual based instrumental music training to enhance Cantonese ESL learners' perceptual learning of English stress. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21266478

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A study on the relationship between musical ability and EFL pronunciation proficiency

Cited by 2 publications

References 27 publications

Language and Music: Designing a Course at an Academic Level

Language and Music: Designing a Course at an Academic Level

What Is “Music” in Music-to-Language Transfer? Musical Ability But Not Musicianship Supports Cantonese Listeners' English Stress Perception

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