Article published in:
Cognitive Individual Differences in Second Language Processing and Acquisition
Edited by Gisela Granena, Daniel O. Jackson and Yucel Yilmaz
[Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 3] 2016
► pp. 131–156

Music, song and speech

A closer look at the interfaces between musicality, singing and individual differences in phonetic language aptitude

| Unit for Language Learning and Teaching Research, Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Austria
| English Linguistics Department, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna, Austria

Recent evidence shows that musical aptitude positively influences language acquisition processes. The underlying mechanisms of why and how musical talent heightens one’s ability to detect, imitate and memorize foreign languages, however, have not yet been fully understood. We set out to test vocalists’ ability to imitate speech. Findings indicated that singing capacity is a good predictor for accent imitation and a better predictor of instrument playing and musical expertise measured perceptually. As we wanted to uncover whether there is a difference between instrumentalists’ and vocalists’ accent imitation abilities, we recruited vocalists, instrumentalists and non-singers/non-musicians and compared their accent imitation skills directly. As expected, vocalists outperformed instrumentalists and non-musicians/non-singers significantly, while the perceptual musicality test showed no significant difference between vocalists and instrumentalists.

Published online: 23 December 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/bpa.3.07chr
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