Abstract
Previous studies show beneficial effects of musicality on the acquisition of a second language (L2). While most research focused on perceptual aspects, only few studies investigated the effects of musicality on productive phonology. The present study tested if musicality can predict productive phonological skills in L2 acquisition. Sixty-three students with no previous exposure to Arabic were asked to repeatedly listen to and immediately reproduce short sentences in standard Arabic. Before the sentence reproduction task, they completed an auditory discrimination task in three different between-subjects condition: attentive, in which participants were asked to discriminate phonological variations in the same Arabic sentence that they were asked to reproduce later; non-attentive, in which participants were asked to detect beeps in the same Arabic sentences without paying attention to their phonological content; and no-exposure, in which participants performed the discrimination task in another language (Serbian). The first, third and seventh reproductions of each participant were rated for intelligibility, accent, and syllabic errors by two independent evaluators, both native speakers of Arabic. Primary results showed that the intelligibility of the reproduced sentences was higher in participants with high musicality scores in the Advanced Measures of Music Audiation. Moreover, the intelligibility of sentences produced by highly musical participants improved more over time than the intelligibility of participants with lower musicality scores. Previous exposure to the Arabic sentence was beneficial in both the attentive and non-attentive conditions. Our results support the idea that musicality can have effects on productive skills even in the very first stages of L2 acquisition.
Highlights
This study focuses on the analysis of the relationships between musicality and speech production skills in L2 acquisition in adults
This study aimed at testing several factors able to predict the acquisition of productive skills in second language acquisition
The experiment included the Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (AMMA; Gordon, 1989), which is a musicality test that assesses melodic and rhythmic skills, and a digit span memory test, which provided a measure of short-term memory capacity
Summary
This study focuses on the analysis of the relationships between musicality and speech production skills in L2 acquisition in adults. We focus on the association between musicality and the acquisition of very early phonological and prosodic abilities in a second language. Perceptual-receptive competencies include the understanding of lexical and grammatical structures and the detection. Musicality Helps L2 Phonological Production of phonological contrasts and prosodic cues in the new language. The limited attention of research on the productive aspects of L2 learning proficiency is probably due to the fact that the receptive and productive abilities are believed to be strongly associated. The evidence of possible different degrees of competence in receptive (passive) and productive (active) bilingualism is consistent with the existence of a gap between the understanding and the production of a second language (e.g., Umbel et al, 1992; Wei et al, 1992)
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