0000000000378853
AUTHOR
Riia Milovanov
The role of musical aptitude and language skills in preattentive duration processing in school-aged children
We examined 10-12-year old elementary school children's ability to preattentively process sound durations in music and speech stimuli. In total, 40 children had either advanced foreign language production skills and higher musical aptitude or less advanced results in both musicality and linguistic tests. Event-related potential (ERP) recordings of the mismatch negativity (MMN) show that the duration changes in musical sounds are more prominently and accurately processed than changes in speech sounds. Moreover, children with advanced pronunciation and musicality skills displayed enhanced MMNs to duration changes in both speech and musical sounds. Thus, our study provides further evidence for…
Foreign language pronunciation skills and musical aptitude A study of Finnish adults with higher education
Abstract The main aim of this study was to examine second language production and discrimination skills in the light of musical aptitude. Our study was conducted in university settings in south-western Finland. English was used as a model for the second language due to its popularity among young adults. There were three types of tests used in this study: a pronunciation test, a phonemic listening discrimination task, and the Seashore test as an index of the musical aptitude. All the participants performed equally well in the phonemic listening discrimination task. However, the participants with higher musical aptitude were able to pronounce English better than the participants with less mus…
Musical aptitude and foreign language learning skills - neural and behavioral evidence about their connections
Perceiving music and language seems to depend upon subtle and accurate auditory processing skills. Could music and language also share common neural resources? Possible interaction between music and speech memory systems has not been ruled out. On the contrary, there is increasing evidence pointing out the accuracy at perceiving phonetic contrasts in native or foreign language of subjects with musical aptitude or musical training. The main focus of this study was to examine the relationship between musical aptitude and linguistic abilities, especially in terms of second language pronunciation skills. We examined 10-12-year-old elementary school children’s ability to preattentively process m…