The benefit of musical and linguistic expertise on language acquisition in sung material

Music learning and training appear to have large cross-domain transfer effects: they are beneficial in various cognitive domains including language. The present study aimed at examining the role of music expertise on how musical and linguistic information contained in songs is used. However, as the superiority of musicians could be attributed to improvements in executive functions (e.g., Bialystok, & DePape, 2009), we tried to isolate the role of music training by comparing music experts to both non-experts and language experts. To this aim we used the tasks proposed by Schön, Boyer, Moreno, Besson, Peretz, and Kolinsky (2008), who compared artificial language learning (ALL) based on spoken sequences to ALL based on sung sequences. These authors concluded that songs, more than speech, allow fast and strong learning. In contrast to Schön et al. (2008), the benefit of songs on ALL was not found among nonexperts in our study. However, there was a highly significant interaction between type of expertise and materials. The music experts were the only group to benefit from the matching of linguistic and music information, hence showing a different profile than language experts. The present data thus confirms the specificity of transfer effects linked to music expertise