Rhythmic Abilities Correlate with L2 Prosody Imitation Abilities in Typologically Different Languages

Abstract

While many studies have demonstrated the relationship between musical rhythm and speech prosody, this has been rarely addressed in the context of second language (L2) acquisition. Here, we investigated whether musical rhythmic skills and the production of L2 speech prosody are predictive of one another. We tested both musical and linguistic rhythmic competences of 23 native French speakers of L2 English. Participants completed perception and production music and language tests. In the prosody production test, sentences containing trisyllabic words with either a prominence on the first or on the second syllable were heard and had to be reproduced. Participants were less accurate in reproducing penultimate accent placement. Moreover, the accuracy in reproducing phonologically disfavored stress patterns was best predicted by rhythm production abilities. Our results show, for the first time, that better reproduction of musical rhythmic sequences is predictive of a more successful realization of unfamiliar L2 prosody, specifically in terms of stress-accent placement.

Music Training and Nonmusical Abilities

“…For 7-and 8-year-old Spanish children, duration and pitch discrimination predict phonological awareness in English (Pujazón 2021). Rhythm ability also predicts French-speaking young adults' ability to produce English words (Cason et al 2020).…”

Musical perception skills predict speech imitation skills: differences between speakers of tone and intonation languages

“…Rhythmic perception skills correlated with a more accurate perception of speech rhythm (Boll-Avetisyan et al, 2017), the production of L2 long and short vowels (Li et al, 2020), and the ability to imitate unfamiliar languages accurately (Christiner & Reiterer, 2013). By the same token, individuals with better rhythmic production skills (i.e., they are better able to reproduce musical rhythmic sequences) could produce word stress more accurately and thus exhibited greater fluency in an L2 (Zheng et al, 2022), and also reproduced unfamiliar prosody more accurately, specifically in terms of stress-accent placement (Cason et al, 2020).…”

Els beneficis de la música en l’aprenentatge fonològic d’una llengua estrangera

“…Com a punt de partida, cal destacar que, al llarg dels anys, la recerca en ciència cognitiva ha aportat molta evidència empírica de l'efecte positiu de l'experiència musical sobre tot un ventall de capacitats cognitives com ara la memòria (Chan et al 1998, George i Coch 2011), la creativitat (Woodward i Sikes 2015) o la velocitat de processament de la informació audiovisual (Bugos i Mostafa 2011). Els possibles efectes de la música sobre el llenguatge també han despertat la curiositat dels investigadors (per exemple, Besson et al 2007, Christiner i Reiterer 2015, Cason et al 2020.…”

“…Slevc i Miyake ( 2006) van demostrar que l'aptitud musical individual prediu les habilitats fonològiques perceptives i productives en una segona llengua quan altres factors com l'exposició a la llengua i la capacitat de memòria de treball fonològic estan controlats. A més, un estudi recent ha mostrat que una major habilitat de producció de ritmes musicals per part d'aprenents francesos de l'anglès prediu una millor pronunciació de l'accentuació dels mots anglesos (Cason et al 2020).…”