Do musicians outperform non-musicians in foreign language prosody production?
(2022) SysMys′22 — Location: Ghent, Belgium (7.September.2022)
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Dejans, Lidwin 
- Abstract
- BACKGROUND In recent years, the relationship between music and language has received increasingly more attention, resulting in multiple studies analyzing the impact of music training or musical skills on different domains of foreign language acquisition, such as phonological skills (Milovanov et. al 2010; Slevc et. al 2006), vocabulary (Swaminathan et. al 2013) and prosody perception (Degrave 2020). However, studies addressing the influence of music on prosody production in a foreign language are rather scarce (Gralińska-Brawata et. al 2017) and the main studies in the field of prosody address the acquisition of English (Marie et. al 2011), Mandarin (Cason et. al 2020) and Spanish (Dupoux et. al 2008). Prosody encompasses “all sound properties of an utterance that are not related to those of its vowels and consonants” (Rietveld et. al 2016) and constitutes the “melodic and rhythmic framework” of an oral utterance (Degrave 2021). The acquisition of Dutch is especially interesting since prosodic differences with French typically cause problems in acquiring spoken Dutch (Rietveld et. al 2016; Rasier 2006). Recent research has studied the perception and production of Dutch word and sentence stress by francophone learners (Rietveld et. al 2016; Degrave 2019; Michaux et. al 2013). Dutch stress is variable, and thus less predictable than the fixed stress in French, and has different functions, i.e. carrying lexical information or structuring information in a sentence (Rietveld et. al 2016). Moreover, erroneous stress placement has been found to impair intelligibility and comprehensibility (Michaux et. al 2015). Hence, this study focuses on the production of Dutch prosody (word and sentence stress) by French-speaking musicians and non-musicians. AIMS The present study investigates the differences between the Dutch prosody production by French-speaking musicians and non-musicians. METHOD The present study includes 20 practicing musicians, with at least 5 years of music lessons, and 20 non-musicians, who have had a maximum of 2 years of music education at least 8 years ago. The participants are monolingually raised with French as their native language, have an intermediate level of Dutch (between A2 and B2), and benefit from a similar exposure to Dutch (e.g., no intensive daily contact with Dutch for more than 6 months and no immersion schools). The control group consists of 10 native speakers of Dutch with a similar profile (5 musicians, 5 non-musicians). We also collect data on the participants’ musical skills through a singing task and on their proficiency level in Dutch using DIALANG subtests (Huhta et. al 2002) and LexTALE (Lemhöfer et. al 2012). The prosody production task, based on (Degrave 2019; Michaux et. al 2014; Boersma et. al 2022), tests the participants’ production of respectively Dutch word stress and sentence stress. A double analysis will be performed on the productions: 3 native speakers of Dutch will evaluate the accuracy of the stress placement, and the productions will also be analyzed acoustically using PRAAT (Boersma et. al 2022). For the statistical analyses of the data, we will use a Two-Sample T-Test. We also used this test to verify that there is no significant difference in language proficiency between the two groups. RESULTS The data analysis is currently in progress (March-May 2022). We expect the production of Dutch prosody to be more nativelike in musicians than in non-musicians. DISCUSSION The results of the present study will be discussed in relation to the existing literature concerning the linguistic performance of musicians and non-musicians.
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Citations
Dejans, L., & Degrave, P. (2022). Do musicians outperform non-musicians in foreign language prosody production? SysMys′22, Ghent, Belgium. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/260902