The Effects of Musical Experience and Aptitude on Phonological Skills in a Foreign Language

Music has been shown to have an important effect on L2 language acquisition. Recently, researchers have investigated how musical ability or experience can give an advantage to L2 learners attempting to acquire specific aspects of a second language in the beginning stages of language acquisition. This study investigates this connection between musicality and early L2 ability in Spanish through a series of tests including a musical aptitude test, two language aptitude tests, a Spanish receptive test, and a Spanish imitation test. Results revealed no significant correlations between musical ability or experience and language ability as tested by the aptitude, receptive, or imitation tests, which questions the universality of the effect of musicality on early stages of L2 acquisition in all languages. Certain demographic characteristics such as worship background were shown to have an effect on performance on one of the language aptitude tests. These results are discussed in relation to how music plays into language learning and how it is observed to play different roles with different languages