‘Stress deafness’: Can music help?

Neuroscience has recently reported that music and speech are intertwined: some neural responses in music and speech are common (Peretz et al. 2015) and music can induce lasting changes in the brain among others for speech processing, such as pitch, syntax or phoneme processing (Marie et al. 2011). Besides these neurological observations, many behavioral studies report a facilitation effect of music on (foreign) language acquisition. On the one hand, musical characteristics of the learner, such as musical training or aptitude, seem to benefit language performance (Chobert & Besson 2013, Kolinsky et al. 2009). On the other hand, the use of music in language teaching methodology, such as songs or rhythmical activities, appear to facilitate language acquisition (Ludke 2016, Schön et al. 2018). In our study, we aimed to analyze if music, either as a characteristic of the learner or used in language teaching methods, could help learners to perceive lexical stress. Lexical stress is indeed often problematic for speakers of a language that do not contain lexical stress. Dupoux et al. (2008) even speak about ‘stress deafness’: French speakers would be – under some conditions – ‘deaf’ to lexical stress, for example in Dutch (Michaux 2016). In order to evaluate whether music can influence lexical stress perception, we tested three groups of French learners of Dutch: one group of musicians and non-musicians (N = 46), one group of university students of Dutch (N = 80) and one group of secondary school pupils in a Dutch (non)-CLIL context (N = 120). They all performed a XAB discrimination task: they heard stimuli of three Dutch words varying in the position of the word stress and mentioned which of the two last matched with the first one. The stimuli were either naturally spoken, either spoken with a beat on the stress, either sung. After the perception tests, participants filled in different questionnaires to evaluate their musical profile. The first results show that both musical characteristics of the participants and musical characteristics of the stimuli facilitate lexical stress perception. References Chobert, J., Besson, M. 2013. Musical expertise and second language learning. Brain Sciences 3(2): 923-940. Dupoux, E., Sebastián-Gallés, N., Navarrete, E., Peperkamp, S. 2008. Persistent stress ‘deafness’: The case of French learners of Spanish. Cognition 106(2): 682-706. Kolinsky, R., Cuvelier, H., Goetry, V., Peretz, I., Morais, J. 2009. Music training facilitates lexical stress processing. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 26(3): 235-246. Ludke, K.M. 2016. Singing and arts activities in support of foreign language learning: An exploratory study. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 12(4): 371-386. Marie, C., Delogu, F., Lampis, G., Belardinelli, M.O., Besson, M. 2011. Influence of musical expertise on segmental and tonal processing in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23(10): 2701-2715. Michaux, M.-C. 2016. La perception de l’accent lexical néerlandais par les apprenants francophones. Langages 202: 47‑74. Peretz, I., Vuvan, D., Lagrois, M.-É., Armony, J.L. 2015. Neural overlap in processing music and speech. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 370(1664):20140090. Schön, D., Boyer, M., Moreno, S., Besson, M., Peretz, I., Kolinsky, R. 2008. Songs as an aid for language acquisition. Cognition 106(2): 975-983