music perception and L2 learning

Music and language may be treated in some similar ways by the human perceptual system, particularly the more musical elements of language, such as tone and stress, which are cued by acoustic cues like pitch, duration and intensity. Tone and stress in particular seem correspond to certain musical counterparts such as melody and rhythm.

In the present study, the relation between learning of second language (L2) prosody and music perception is examined. While musicians were found to be better at encoding lexical tone or stress in an L2 than non-musicians, consistent conclusions have not been reached on how different sub-domains of music perception are associated with different facets of learning L2 prosodic units. By focusing on Mandarin learners of English, our current study investigates how distinct sub-domains of music perception, such as melody and rhythm, differentially contribute to the fine-grained acoustic adjustments required for native-like prosodic production, which were measured by difference scores of three acoustic cues: duration, F0 and amplitude.