Musical Aptitude and foreign language receptive pronunciation

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature that recognises the relationship between musical aptitude and language proficiency. Language is usually segmented into its subcategories when addressed in studies, while music is not. Due to this, it is unclear whether language proficiency is related to all music components (pitch, rhythm, etc.) in the same way. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between musical aptitude and receptive pronunciation in a foreign language, in this case, English. To achieve it, a field research study has been designed, in which participated 71 second grade 7-8-year-old students (34 boys and 37 girls) from a bilingual public school. Two tests were administered to measure their musical aptitude and their ability of discriminating phonemes. The musical test consisted of six exercises that assessed the different sub-skills of musical aptitude (pitch, loudness, duration, rhythm, timbre and tempo perception). On the other hand, the pronunciation test measured their auditory ability to differentiate phonemes in a foreign language. Our results show a positive correlation between musical aptitude and the identification of foreign language sounds.