Second Language Acquisition

Becoming proficient in a foreign language takes a number of different skills, from acquiring a new set of syntactic structures to learning a new vocabulary and its pronunciation. The reason for exploring the relationship between music and second language production is because many of the mechanisms that such skills entail are also relevant in music listening and performance. For example, distinguishing slight variations in pitch to decipher correct tuning could be compared with distinguishing slight variations in timbre for phonemic discrimination of a new language. Alternatively, both language and music are comprised of hierarchical structures, and hence music could be used to provide a framework on which to lay a new linguistic sequence.

There are two main ways in which music has been incorporated into language learning research. First, because of the relationship between music and language processing, it has been theorized that expertise in music leads to better second language acquisition. Evidence for a benefit of musical training in second language (L2) acquisition has been relatively consistent, particularly with respect to pronunciation skill. Second, presenting verbal information using song or background music has been found to facilitate memory and learning in both the native language and additional languages, though this field of research is small and requires further exploration. It has been suggested that the reason for such a link between music and second language acquisition is because of a set of shared neural networks, with musical training enhancing discrimination skills, and paired musical-linguistic presentation enhancing information encoding.