The Melody of Speech: What the Melodic Perception of Speech Reveals about Language Performance and Musical Abilities

Abstract

Research has shown that melody not only plays a crucial role in music but also in language acquisition processes. Evidence has been provided that melody helps in retrieving, remembering, and memorizing new language material, while relatively little is known about whether individuals who perceive speech as more melodic than others also benefit in the acquisition of oral languages. In this investigation, we wanted to show which impact the subjective melodic perception of speech has on the pronunciation of unfamiliar foreign languages. We tested 86 participants for how melodic they perceived five unfamiliar languages, for their ability to repeat and pronounce the respective five languages, for their musical abilities, and for their short-term memory (STM). The results revealed that 59 percent of the variance in the language pronunciation tasks could be explained by five predictors: the number of foreign languages spoken, short-term memory capacity, tonal aptitude, melodic singing ability, and how melodic the languages appeared to the participants. Group comparisons showed that individuals who perceived languages as more melodic performed significantly better in all language tasks than those who did not. However, even though we expected musical measures to be related to the melodic perception of foreign languages, we could only detect some correlations to rhythmical and tonal musical aptitude. Overall, the findings of this investigation add a new dimension to language research, which shows that individuals who perceive natural languages to be more melodic than others also retrieve and pronounce utterances more accurately.

Musical Performance in Adolescents with ADHD, ADD and Dyslexia—Behavioral and Neurophysiological Aspects

“…Musical performance has been defined by a number of diverse musical capacities. These include sight-reading (performing unfamiliar music from notation), performing well-prepared pieces from memory or from notation, improvising, playing by ear (performing music from aural presentation) and singing familiar and unfamiliar melodies [ 1 , 9 , 10 , 90 , 91 , 92 ]. Musical performance depends on accurate timing ability [ 93 ], metrical structure and on the organization of a piece of music [ 94 , 95 ].…”

“…A detailed description of the principal component analysis, the participants and findings are included in the Supplementary Materials for further illustration (see Figure S1 and Table S1 ). To assess interrater reliability, we ran a correlational analysis based on previous investigations [ 10 , 14 ]. The results indicated high interrater reliability.…”

“…In addition, there are self-report questionnaire inventories such as the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI), which measures musical sophistication and consists of five factors: active engagement, perceptual abilities, musical training, singing ability and emotions [ 7 ]. However, to date, there are only few musical performance measures which focus either on the reproduction of rhythmical and melodic sequences [ 8 ] or on performing familiar or unfamiliar songs [ 9 , 10 ].…”

“…However, computerized methods can reach their limits. For instance, when individuals play musical pieces or perform songs technically perfect but in an inaccurate pitch, they could be evaluated poorly, even though the performance may be quite good [ 10 , 13 ]. In contrast, music performance assessments are often based on very time-consuming approaches [ 14 ] with rating scales based on certain criteria chosen by experts in the field [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ].…”

Examining Individual Differences in Singing, Musical and Tone Language Ability in Adolescents and Young Adults with Dyslexia

“…In general, there are two main branches of singing studies that focus on the positive transfer from singing to language: studies using singing as a tool to learn new vocabulary [ 43 , 44 ], and studies focusing on singing ability and its relationship to language ability. The latter used phonetic aptitude measures in which utterances of unfamiliar foreign languages had to be pronounced [ 36 , 45 , 46 ] or foreign accents had to be imitated [ 31 ] (so-called delayed mimicry paradigm [ 47 ]). These studies provide growing evidence that singing ability is particularly associated with the ability to mimic foreign accents and the ability to imitate and to pronounce foreign words and longer sequences of phrases [ 31 , 45 , 46 , 48 , 49 ].…”