Music and l2 prosody: the role of music aptitude on the discrimination of stress contrasts in l2

In this study, we investigated the effect of music aptitude on French and German listeners' performance at discriminating stress contrasts in Spanish L2, before and after a 4-hour perceptual training in Spanish. For the French listeners, results showed that the better the music aptitude the better the stress discrimination performance (before and after training). Regarding German listeners, music aptitude did not show any effect on the discrimination of stress contrasts in Spanish L2. The link between music and L2 stress discrimination in French listeners (and its absence in German listeners) suggests that French and German listeners do not process stress information in the same way. It might be that, since French listeners, contrary to German listeners, are not used to stress encoding mechanism in their native language, they interpret information related to L2 prosody (such as lexical stress) in a more "musical way"