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.
Highlights
Interdisciplinary research on music and language has become rather diverse over the past two decades
The results showed that 59 percent of the variance of pronunciation ability was explained by five predictors: the number of foreign languages, short-term memory (STM) capacity, tonal musical aptitude, how melodic the languages appeared to the individuals, and how well the participants were able to sing familiar and unfamiliar melodies
We found that the more languages individuals spoke, the more accurately they pronounced the unfamiliar languages
Summary
Interdisciplinary research on music and language has become rather diverse over the past two decades. The reason for this development is evident as music and language share a set of characteristics (Jackendoff and Lerdahl 2006). The similarities between language and music are rather salient on the acoustic level. This becomes obvious if one looks at speech directed to infants. It is rather slow, shows more pitch variation, and is often perceived to be more melodic in its characteristics than adult speech (Kuhl et al 1997; McMullen and Saffran 2004). Whereas that for music is based on pitches and timbres, the linguistic sound system consists of pitch contrasts, vowels, and consonants (Patel 2007)
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