Second Language Phonological Acquisition: The Role of Musical Aptitude
Open Access
- Author:
- Davis, Kristopher Allen
- Graduate Program:
- Spanish
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 02, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Chip Gerfen, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Dr Chip Gerfen, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Paola Eulalia Dussias, Committee Member
Barry Richard Page Jr., Committee Member
John Andres Ochoa, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Accent
Language
Phonetics
Individual Differences
Accentedness
Music
Phonology - Abstract:
- It has long been suggested that those with greater musical aptitude possess an advantage when learning foreign languages; such hypotheses have been around since the early twentieth century. There are many structural, cognitive, and neural similarities between language and music. Both language and music operate in the acoustic realm, stringing a finite set of sounds together to form longer and more meaningful sequences. These sounds involved in music and language are made of several frequencies as well. One also finds similar mismatched negativity effects in language and music: a speech stream that contains a syntactic violation produces the same MMN effect as a musical sequence that contains an analogous violation in key-modulation. In recent years, more and more evidence has pointed to language and music using a shared system of sound acquisition for creating mental representations of sounds. To test this hypothesis, twenty-five undergraduate students enrolled in the Basic Spanish Language Program here at Penn State performed tasks which test their musical aptitude, working memory, and an information suppression task. Then, they are asked to say a list of common Spanish words—once by reading the list of words one at a time from a computer screen, and the second time by repeating the words after a native speaker. Results show that those with higher scores on the musical aptitude test had pronounced certain speech sounds closer to native speaker norms than those participants with lower musical aptitude.