The Influence of Musical Training on L2 Intonation, Phonology and Verbal Memory

The aim of this paper was to explore how musical training affects such L2 abilities as auditory processing (intonation, phonology) and verbal memory. For seeing into the former a considerable amount of neurological and behavioural data were collected and in the examination of the latter, a small experiment was also conducted besides presenting the theoretical background. In this experiment twelve (6 musician and 6 non-musician) secondary school students participated. They were required to complete a questionnaire about their English as well as musical background to obtain the relevant data. This was followed by a vocabulary pre-test, which measured whether there was considerable preliminary knowledge of the target words by students, in which case the content should have been modified. In the experiment itself, 14 words were taught to the students through two small texts and during the instruction they could also see the list of these words with their Hungarian equivalents. Following this, they were presented with two tests on the taught words, one concentrating on receptive-productive, and the other purely on productive abilities. Musician students had a tendency to have higher performance in the experiment but results showed contradictions, too. In the Immediate recall section musicians performed better in Task 2 (purely productive) but not in Task 1 (receptive-productive), while in the Delayed recall section musicians’ advantage was unanimous. Additionally, calculations seeking the relation between duration of musical training and level of success in vocabulary learning suggested no causal relationship between musical background and verbal memory abilities.Bscanglisztik