Associations between music perception and the production of acoustic cues to lexical stress in Mandarin learners of English

Prior work has suggested that musical abilities are associated with second language (L2) learning at both segmental and prosodic levels: For example, musicians are better at encoding lexical tone or stress in an L2 than non-musicians are. However, it remains unclear how the weighting of distinct acoustic cues when producing L2 prosody may be supported by musical abilities. Our current study investigated two different sub-domains of music perception, melody and rhythm, and their link to the accurate production of English lexical stress by native Mandarin speakers, as measured by differences from native English speakers in duration, F0, and amplitude. Melody, but not rhythm perception (and controlling for other speech perception skills, including the perception of lexical stress), significantly contributed to the production of duration and was also marginally predictive of amplitude, but not F0 production. We argue that the weak or null effects of music perception on F0 production may be due to Mandarin speakers’ F0 sensitivity from their native language, which may complicate the mapping of auditory perception onto L2 speech production skills. Results suggest complex associations between music and language in learners’ use of specific acoustic cues in their production of L2 prosody.

Duration (music) · Mandarin Chinese · Musical · Perception · Prosody · Speech perception · Speech production · Stress (linguistics) · Tone (literature) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Neuroscience and Music Perception · Phonetics and Phonology Research

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