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https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830919826334
Language
and Speech
Language and Speech
1 –17
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DOI: 10.1177/0023830919826334
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Rhythmic Abilities Correlate
with L2 Prosody Imitation
Abilities in Typologically
Different Languages
Nia Cason
Aix Marseille Univ, INSERM, INS, Inst Neurosci Syst, Marseille, France
Muriel Marmursztejn
Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS, LPL, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
Mariapaola D’Imperio
Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS, LPL, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France
Daniele Schön
Aix Marseille Univ, INSERM, INS, Inst Neurosci Syst, Marseille, France
Abstract
While many studies have demonstrated the relationship between musical rhythm and speech
prosody, this has been rarely addressed in the context of second language (L2) acquisition. Here, we
investigated whether musical rhythmic skills and the production of L2 speech prosody are predictive
of one another. We tested both musical and linguistic rhythmic competences of 23 native French
speakers of L2 English. Participants completed perception and production music and language tests. In
the prosody production test, sentences containing trisyllabic words with either a prominence on the
first or on the second syllable were heard and had to be reproduced. Participants were less accurate
in reproducing penultimate accent placement. Moreover, the accuracy in reproducing phonologically
disfavored stress patterns was best predicted by rhythm production abilities. Our results show,
for the first time, that better reproduction of musical rhythmic sequences is predictive of a more
successful realization of unfamiliar L2 prosody, specifically in terms of stress-accent placement.
Keywords
Music, speech, foreign language, temporal patterns, stress patterns
Corresponding author:
Daniele Schön, Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes, Faculté de Médecine, 27 bd Jean Moulin, Marseille, 13005,
France.
Email: daniele.schon@univ-amu.fr
826334LAS0010.1177/0023830919826334Language and SpeechCason et al.
research-article2019
Original Article
2 Language and Speech 00(0)
1 Introduction
Rhythm in both music and language organizes events in time. Rhythm perception has been thought
to be an innate predisposition of human cognition that may be similarly processed across domains
(e.g., Besson & Schön, 2001; Patel, 2014; Patel & Morgan, 2016). This is true for both “beat” (the
perception of an underlying regular pulse) and “meter” (the perception of alternating weak and
strong elements; London, 2004). Notably, the patterning of weak and strong elements is a funda-
mental characteristic of both speech and music, which could explain why rhythm in music has been
compared to stress in language (Patel, 2006; Schön & Tillmann, 2015; Magne, Jordan, & Gordon,
2016). However, the links between rhythmic skills in music and speech have rarely been studied in
the context of second language (L2) learning. The present study investigated the link between
musical rhythmic competences and realization of L2 speech prosody, with the idea that better
musical rhythmic skills would predict a more accurate realization of L2 prosody, specifically in
terms of correct stress-accent placement (for the notion of stress-accent, see Beckman, 1986).
The perception of meter is crucial for language acquisition. During native language (L1) acqui-
sition in infancy, metrical structures in speech serve as important cues in speech segmentation
(Cutler & Butterfield, 1992; Jusczyk, Houston, & Newsome, 1999; Kuhl, 2004; Morgan & Saffran,
1995), which has been found to be facilitated by musical skills in childhood (François, Chobert,
Besson, & Schön, 2013). One idea is that rhythmic entrainment (the coupling between the temporal
structure of a stimulus and brain oscillatory activity) enhances the precision of auditory analyses
and, as a consequence, enhances speech segmentation abilities (Hornickel & Kraus, 2013; Moreno
et al., 2009). For instance, musical rhythmic abilities have been found to correlate with phonologi-
cal abilities in preschoolers (Moritz, Yampolsky, Papadelis, Thomson, & Wolf, 2013), with reading
ability in school-age children (Strait, Hornickel, & Kraus, 2011), and seem to be particularly rele-
vant in decoding words requiring the use of linguistic stress (David, Wade-Woolley, Kirby, &
Smithrim, 2007). Furthermore, metrical characteristics of L1 also affect rhythm perception
(Iversen, Patel, & Oghushi, 2008; Kusumoto & Moreton, 1997) and may influence the rhythmic
structure of instrumental music (Patel & Daniele, 2003), which suggests there to be a bidirectional
influence of music and language temporal structures.
When turning to L2 learning, there is also evidence of a link between musical skills and L2
perception abilities (for reviews, see Chobert & Besson, 2013; Zeromskaite, 2014; Dittinger et al.,
2016), including the detection of prosodic anomalies (Milovanov & Tervaniemi, 2011), prosodic
pitch manipulations (Marquès, Moreno, Castro, & Besson, 2007), pitch contour (Zhao & Kuhl,
2015), speech imitation (Christiner & Reiterer, 2013), and phonological perception and production
(Slevc & Myiake, 2006). These findings indicate that there may be shared resources between music
and L2 acquisition. However, musical aptitude has largely been determined by musical melodic/
pitch skills rather than rhythmic skills, which may be distinct (Phillips-Silver et al., 2011). Some
evidence suggests that rhythmic skills may actually be a better predictor of L2 acquisition than
pitch/melodic skills (Kempe, Bublitz, & Brooks, 2015). Indeed, recent work from Boll-Avetisyan,
Bhatara, and Höhle (2017) found that musical rhythm aptitude, but not melody aptitude, was asso-
ciated with rhythmic speech perception in native listeners.
Although links between L2 production abilities and musical rhythmic skills have rarely been
demonstrated (Christiner & Reiterer, 2013; Christiner, Rüdegger, & Reiterer, 2018), rhythm and
intonation have long been regarded as one of the greatest obstacles in L2 acquisition (Calbris &
Montredon, 1975). This may be because L2 acquisition is strongly affected by the metrical charac-
teristics of L1. Metrical “rules” that exist for L1 are used in the interpretation and segmentation of
L2, even when these same rules do not apply (Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui, 1986, 1992; Otake,
Cason et al. 3
Hatano, Cutler, & Mehler, 1993). The language-specific use of metrical cues in French, for exam-
ple, has been used to explain difficulties in encoding foreign stress contrasts that exist in Spanish
(Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastian, & Mehler, 1997; Dupoux, Sebastian, Navarete, & Peperkamp, 2008),
English (Kolinsky, Cuvelier, Goetry, Peretz, & Morais, 2009), and German (Schmidt-Kassow,
Rothermich, Schwartze, & Kotz, 2011), which are attenuated by musical experience (Boll-
Avetisyan, Bhatara, & Höhle, 2016).
In the present study, we investigated native French speakers with knowledge of English as an
L2. The fundamental metrical differences between French and English can pose a challenge for
native French speakers learning English. Indeed, French speakers find stress and pitch accent
placement in English to be one of the most challenging points (see Capliez, 2011; Frost, 2008).
Although French is considered to be a language in which lexical stress cues are absent (Dupoux et
al., 1997, 2008; Cooper, Cutler, & Wales, 2002), it is characterized by the presence of stress at a
phrasal level (the Accentual Phrase, or AP; see Jun & Fougeron, 2000; Post, 2000). In fact, while
stress is a property of the word in English, it is a phrasal property in French. Namely, stress is
located at an AP-final position in French (on the last full syllable of the AP), although an AP-initial
pitch prominence is allowed in the case of an initial rise (Delattre, 1938; Hirst & Di Cristo, 1998;
Fonagy, 1980; Vaissière, 1974). French speakers may therefore have a less-rich representation of
speech meter compared to speakers of languages in which stress position is more variable, such as
English (Di Cristo, 2003; Cutler & Carter, 1987; Tortel, 2009). Findings that native French speak-
ers find it difficult to detect accentual contrasts that are not found in French support this idea (e.g.,
Dupoux et al., 2008; Kijak, 2009; Michelas, Frauenfelder, Schön, & Dufour, 2016; Bhatara, Boll-
Avetisyan, Agus, Höhle, & Nazzi, 2016; Boll-Avetisyan et al., 2016).
To summarize, the link between rhythm in speech and in music is now quite well-established,
but has yet to be investigated in the context of L2 prosody acquisition, especially in terms of speech
production and imitation. Recent imitation studies have investigated production capabilities and
individual differences in reproducing fine phonetic detail in prosody, such as tonal alignment
(D’Imperio, Cavone, & Petrone, 2014) or syllable length (Cavone & D’Imperio, 2016). We thus
investigated the relationship between rhythmic competences in music perception and production in
relation to the ability for native French speakers to perceive and produce stress-accent placement
in English words, specifically in word-initial and penultimate position. We hypothesized that musi-
cal rhythmic skills would be positively correlated with accuracy in the production of stress accent
placement, and that this would be particularly evident for the penultimate stress, which is absent in
the French system and is thus more difficult to realize. Our findings offer further support for a com-
mon processing of rhythm in language and music, and might also have practical implications for
L2 learning techniques.
2 Materials And Methods
2.1 Participants
Twenty-three native French speakers studying at the science campus of Aix-Marseille University
(16 female, age range 19–24 years, mean age 21 years) participated in the study. Participants had
started learning English between the ages of 5 and 12 years (mean = 9.9 years; SD = 1.79) and had
between 7 and 15 years of training in English (mean = 9.9 years; SD = 1.78). In other words, the
level of English proficiency is that which French-speaking adults typically have gained from gen-
eral school education. Twelve participants had received some musical training, which had started
between the ages of 4 and 17 years (mean = 9.7 years, SD = 4.6; mean years of practice = 6.2, SD
= 4.5). The remaining 11 participants had no musical practice (outside of the very basic school
4 Language and Speech 00(0)
curriculum). All participants gave their written formal consent and received a bonus of one point
on their English grade for the semester for participating in this study. Participants completed both
musical and linguistic tests, and the order of these tests was counterbalanced across participants.
2.2 Musical Tasks
Music perception. A subset of the Musical Ear Test (Wallentin, Nielsen, Friis-Olivarius,
Vuust, & Vuust, 2010) was used to test melodic and rhythmic perception abilities. More pre-
cisely, we used the first 26 trials of each task instead of the entire 52 of the original Musical
Ear Test. This was done so that all tasks could be completed in a single session. Because the
Cronbach’s α-consistency was very high for both melodic and rhythmic tests (0.95, reported
in Wallentin et al., 2010), reducing the number of items should not make a major difference.
For each trial, participants were asked to decide whether two short musical phrases (melodic
or rhythmic) were the same or different. When different, two musical phrases differed from
one another by a single element (one note for the melodic phrases, one rhythmic change for
the rhythmic phrases).
Music production. Rhythmic production. Nine rhythmic sequences with a synthesized wood-
block sound were played through loudspeakers. Each sequence consisted of three to seven sounds
for a total of 46 sounds/taps (see Figure A1). Participants were orally asked to reproduce each
rhythm once by tapping a wooden stick on a box right after listening to the sequence. No metro-
nome cue was provided. A microphone was positioned next to the box and the participants’ perfor-
mance was recorded. A change-in-slope detection algorithm was used to extract the precise tapping
times. We did not want to penalize globally slower or faster reproductions, so rhythmic production
accuracy was measured by calculating the ratio of the productions of the 46 taps with those of the
actual stimuli. For this, all intervals between two successive taps (tn−tn1) were computed, and each
interval was divided by the interval that preceded it (tn1–tn2). The ratios for the participants’ produc-
tions were then compared with those for the model stimuli (m), and the mean of the absolute value
of the difference for all of the ratios obtained for all nine stimuli (N) was computed for each partici-
pant using the following formula:
abs/
//
nn1n1n2nn1 n1 n2
tt tt mm mm N−−−− −
()()()()
∑
This metric purposefully ignores the extent to which the tempo of the subject’s drumming was
similar to that of the stimulus. There was no reason to think that absolute tempo would be linked to
stress placement, which is a relative phenomenon.
Melodic production. Participants were presented with a subset of stimuli from Lévêque and
Schön (2013) through headphones, which comprised 10 stimuli of five isochronous notes each
(see Figure A2). Participants were asked to reproduce each stimulus sequence once, immedi-
ately after hearing it. The melodic structure of the stimuli was tonal, which corresponds to
what may be found in a popular song repertoire. The stimuli were sung by female or male
voices and were presented accordingly to the participants’ gender. The pitch range of the 50
pitches to be sung was adapted to adult tessitura and stimuli were presented one octave lower
for male participants. PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2009) was used to extract the median
fundamental frequency of each note of the five-note vocal productions of the participants
(discarding the transition glides). Then, the same procedure described for rhythmic production
was used to compute the ratios of pitch frequency between successive intervals and to com-
pare it to the model.
Cason et al. 5
2.3 Linguistic Tasks
General English level assessment. An online test for the different levels of the Common European
Framework of Reference for Languages was used (http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/test-your-
english/adult-learners/). This consists of 25 multiple-choice questions presented in a written format
that test vocabulary, grammar, and idiomatic expression knowledge to assess L2 English profi-
ciency. Every correct item was given one point (score range 0–25).
Imitation of lexical stress in L2. This task was developed to assess the ability to correctly imple-
ment lexical stress in a foreign language. For this, we assessed the ability to implement a nuclear pitch
accent associated with the second (penultimate) syllable of a trisyllabic word, which is a location that
never receives primary stress in the participants’ L1 (French). Participants heard sentences recorded
by an American English speaker and were asked to immediately reproduce them. A script of each
sentence was made available to reduce memory load. The 40 test sentences were organized in a sim-
ple Subject-Verb-Object mode and ended with an adverbial (one or two words, see Appendix B). The
sentences contained either a high-frequency trisyllabic target word with a stress on the first syllable
(e.g., They met the MInister yesterday) or on the penultimate syllable (e.g., They got a new aPA R tment
last month), which is a primary stress location that is rare in French (Hayes, 1995). The target word,
selected from the CELEX database (Burnage et al., 1990), was the object noun in all Subject-Verb-
Object sentences and thus bore the nuclear stress of the sentence, given that they were all-focus utter-
ances. Frequency of lexical similarity (i.e., cognate words that are similar in both languages, such as
“Minister/Ministre”) was controlled across the two stress conditions (stress on syllable 1, stress on
syllable 2); most target words were French–English cognates (32/40). Ten sentence fillers that did not
contain any trisyllabic nouns were added. The sentences were presented in a pseudo-random order.
Two native English speakers listened to the participants’ recordings and used a binary rating system
(1 correct; 0 incorrect) to evaluate whether the participants had succeeded or not in placing the nuclear
accent on the correct syllable. The procedure was blind with respect to the results in the other tasks.
When the two judges did not agree on a rating, the trial received a rating of 0.5. The two judges
agreed on 82% of the words, with a κ-reliability score of 0.64. To further test the reliability of the
judges, we added a third judge and obtained a Cohen κ-reliability score of 0.74, which is considered
as a good inter-rater agreement (Fleiss, 1981).
The decision to use judges to decide whether accent production was correct or not was dictated
by the absence of solidly established values that allow us to determine whether a syllable is stressed
or not. Lexical stress is defined in terms of relative perceived prominence of a syllable in a multi-
syllabic word (Ladd, 1996/2008). Perceptually, stressed syllables are expected to be comparatively
longer in duration, higher in pitch (when carrying a high or rising pitch accent), and perhaps louder
than unstressed syllables (Lehiste & Lass, 1976). However, there are several obstacles to objective
and automatic stress identification; acoustic correlates of stress and accent are highly language-
specific (for a review, see Ortega-Llebaria & Prieto, 2011, for instance). Furthermore, stress pro-
duction in L2 is subject to a variable amount of interference between L1 and L2 prosody. Hence, it
is common practice to perform an auditory transcription of stress (see Michelas & D’Imperio,
2012, for French, and Cho & McQueen, 2005, for Dutch), given that the perception of prominence
is categorical and susceptible to linguistic–perceptual judgment.
3 Results
First, we explored the results for each task and, when appropriate, compared performance against
chance or across conditions or tasks. A descriptive correlation analysis was then performed to see
whether the different tasks were related to each other. Because several variables were found to be
6 Language and Speech 00(0)
correlated, a factor analysis was conducted; this is a more advanced multivariate technique that
allows the identification of variables that go well together and can be “summarized” in a small
number of factors. Finally, a regression analysis was performed, which allowed us to test the
hypothesis that performance of stress placement in ultimate and penultimate positions is best pre-
dicted by language proficiency or musical (melodic or rhythmic) skills.
3.1 Music and Language Tasks
There were no significant differences between the % of correct responses in the melody and rhythm
perception tasks (Figure 1A; Wilcoxon, z = 0.5, p = 0.6). However, the population dispersion was
smaller in the rhythm perception task, which indicates a more homogenous level of performance
(although there was one participant with a very poor rhythmic performance). Participants were able
to perform the melody and rhythm perception tasks well above chance level (one sample t-test,
always p < 0.001). For music production tasks (Figure 1B), a more homogenous level of perfor-
mance was also seen for rhythm compared to melody. Note that, although data are represented in
terms of % distance from the model, it is impossible to directly compare melody and rhythm results
due to the difference in units (Hertz vs. milliseconds, respectively). We also computed the α-Cronbach
measure of reliability (Cronbach, 1951) to assess whether our measures were robust. Both melody
and rhythm production showed a very high internal consistency (α = 0.93 and 0.86, respectively).
Scores for the English proficiency test (Figure 2A) showed a rather widespread distribution
with a median of 13/25 (range 7–20). Thus, the population we tested did not include participants
with beginner or expert English proficiency levels. For the speech imitation task (Figure 2B), par-
ticipants were better able to correctly reproduce stress when it occurred on the first compared to the
second syllable (Wilcoxon, z = 3.2, p = 0.001).
Figure 1. A: Boxplots of the % of correct responses for the music perception tasks.
B: Boxplots of the % difference from the stimuli for the music production tasks.
Min = minimum; max = maximum.
Cason et al. 7
3.2 Correlation Analysis
A Spearman’s correlation analysis (based on ranks) was performed to test the strength of relationships
between variables. Correlations between all the musical and language tasks are provided in Table 1. An
overview of significant values (in bold, p < 0.05, one-tailed, uncorrected) shows that accuracy in the
imitation task was correlated with English proficiency level. Significant correlations were also found
between the musical perception tasks (melody and rhythm) and between the musical production tasks
(melody and rhythm). Rhythm production was the only musical dimension that was correlated with
imitation accuracy, when the stress had to be placed on the second syllable. A post-hoc power analysis
was computed using the software G Power 3.1.9.2 given α (0.05), sample size and effect size (r) and
showed that significant correlations always achieved a power greater than 0.7 (range 0.7–0.9). The
interdependence between these variables was further tested using a factor analysis.
3.3 Factor Analysis
The factor analysis included results from the language tasks (English proficiency level and imita-
tion) and the music perception and production tasks (rhythm and melody). Preliminary testing
Figure 2. A: Boxplot of the number of correct responses for the Cambridge test.
B: Boxplots of the % of correct responses for the imitation task when the prominence was on the first or
in the second syllable of the trisyllabic words.
Min = minimum; max = maximum.
8 Language and Speech 00(0)
showed that our model was satisfactorily adequate; The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index measuring the
sampling adequacy gave a value greater than 0.6. Finally, following two different methods to esti-
mate the number of factors (using the software package FACTOR, Unrestricted Factor Analysis
9.2 by Urbano Lorenzo-Seva and Pere J. Ferrando) and an eigenvalue criterion ⩾1, two factors
were extracted that explained 69% of the variance (Table 2).
The first factor showed high factor loadings (i.e., correlation coefficients between variables and
factors) for melody and rhythm perception, rhythm production, and imitation accuracy of the syl-
lable with disfavored lexical stress. Thus, this first factor can be interpreted as describing musical
abilities. The second factor showed high factor loadings for English proficiency scores and imita-
tion accuracy of words with initial-syllable stress. It can thus be interpreted as a factor that describes
more specific linguistic abilities.
3.4 Regression Analyses
In the regression analyses, the two outcomes of the imitation task (imitation of syllable 1 and of
syllable 2) were considered as dependent variables in separate analyses. The outcome of the factor
Table 1. Spearman’s correlation coefficients between the dependent variables.
L2 proficiency
level
Melody
perception
Rhythm
perception
Melody
production
Rhythm
production
Syllable 1
Imitation
Melody perception −0.03
Rhythm perception 0.23 0.62
(0.35, 1)
Melody production −0.23 –0.45
(–0.8, –0.1)
−0.35
Rhythm production −0.35 −0.36 –0.5
(–0.9, –0.15)
0.14
Syllable 1 imitation 0.59
(0.34, 1)
0.06 0.21 0.04 −0.1
Syllable 2 imitation 0.47
(0.1, 0.8)
0.33 0.16 −0.12 –0.53
(–0.9, –0.15)
0.39
Bold represents significant correlations. Values in parentheses indicate the 95% confidence interval.
Table 2. Varimax rotated factor loadings for the language and music variables, using the option “Blank”
(<I0.40I).
Factor 1 Factor 2
(–3.16) (–1.71)
L2 proficiency level −0.54 0.70
Melody perception –0.76 −0.47
Rhythm perception –0.83
Melody production −0.49
Rhythm production –0.85
Syllable 1 imitation 0.79
Syllable 2 imitation –0.71 0.40
Explained variance 45% 24%
Bold represents significant correlations.
L2 = second language.
Cason et al. 9
analysis was used to select the most appropriate predictors, as follows: L2 proficiency and melody
perception for syllable 1 and rhythm production and rhythm and melody perception for syllable 2.
When considering imitation accuracy of the first syllable, L2 proficiency significantly predicted
the outcome (β = 0.61, F = 12.8, p = 0.002). When considering imitation accuracy of the penul-
timate syllable, only rhythm production significantly predicted the outcome (β = 0.81, F = 7.8, p
= 0.01), whereas rhythm and melody perception did not reach significance (rhythm: β = 0.23, F
< 1; melody: β = 0.08, F < 1). We computed f2 Cohen values from the R2 values of the regression
and used these as effect sizes, together with α (0.05) and sample size (23) to compute post-hoc
achieved power using G*Power 3.1.9.2. Although the post-hoc power analysis showed that signifi-
cant regressors achieved a power > 0.8, results of the regression analysis should nonetheless be
treated with caution due to the rather limited sample size.
4 Discussion
One of the greatest challenges in L2 acquisition is being able to reproduce prosodic structure, par-
ticularly rhythm and intonation (Calbris & Montredon, 1975). We used a novel task to investigate
the links between musical skills and the ability to imitate speech prosody in L2, which is an ele-
ment of speech that is crucial for decoding the speech signal. French participants were more able
to imitate accent placement for word-initial than for penultimate stress location in English L2. This
was expected given the constraint against moving the primary stress location away from the edges
of the AP in French. Most importantly, correct placement of the nuclear accent was well predicted
by rhythm production scores. More precisely, participants with better rhythm reproduction ability
were more able to reproduce penultimate stress by placement of a correct nuclear accent. Whereas
previous studies have investigated the possible links between rhythm perception and language
abilities in the context of L1 perception (Hausen et al., 2013), ours is the first study to show a link
between musical rhythm production and the ability to correctly imitate stress-accent placement in
an L2 that is characterized by a typologically different prosodic system. Our results suggest that
rhythmic training may possibly have a facilitatory effect in learning appropriate L2 prosody (and
vice versa; see Bhatara, Yeung, & Nazzi, 2015, for a similar conclusion on the link between foreign
language experience L2 and rhythm perception).
4.1 L2 Acquisition and Musical Rhythmic Skills
Several studies have found a relationship between musicianship and L2 skills (e.g., Lee & Hung,
2008). However, studies investigating the relationship between specific musical skills and L2 have
primarily focused on perception and general L2 proficiency (Bhatara et al., 2015; Boll-Avetisyan
et al., 2016), or have looked at links between general musical experience and L2 rhythm (Bhatara
et al., 2016). Other studies have focused on the musical dimension of pitch processing and have not
systematically attempted to tease-apart pitch and rhythmic abilities (Posedel, Emery, Souza, &
Fountain, 2012; Milovanov, Huotilainen, Välimäki, Esquef, & Tervaniemi, 2008; Slevc & Miyake,
2006). Not only does this mean that there are relatively few studies concerned with temporal pro-
cessing, which is crucial for language and speech comprehension (Goswami, 2011), but it is also
questionable how pitch processing in music can be compared to pitch processing in speech (such
as in tonal and intonational languages). For instance, a small inaccuracy in pitch-level production
is extremely salient in music (e.g., one-third of a tone), but goes unnoticed in speech. Saying this,
musical relative pitch skills may be relevant when studying factors that may impact the acquisition
of tonal languages; notably, non-native musicians more accurately perceive Mandarin tones com-
pared to nonmusicians (Lee & Hung, 2008; Gottfried & Riester, 2000).
10 Language and Speech 00(0)
Regarding the temporal aspects of speech, musical expertise has been found to have an effect
on the discrimination of consonant and vowel duration in both L1 and L2 (Sadakata & Sekiyama,
2011) and the identification of segmental and tonal contrasts in L2 (Marie et al., 2011). In a lon-
gitudinal study, François et al. (2013) found that music training predicts more efficient speech
segmentation skills in an artificial language in children. Overall, well-developed rhythmic abili-
ties could translate into a better detection of speech regularities (Kraus, Strait, & Parbery-Clark,
2012). Additionally, music-L2 links are most probably bidirectional (Bidelman, Hutka, & Moreno,
2013). For instance, an enhanced music rhythm perception has been found for those who have
mastered an L2 (Roncaglia-Denissen, Roor, Chen, & Sadakata, 2016); this is particularly true
when the L2 is rhythmically different relatively to the L1, an effect that cannot be simply explained
by exposure to more complex musical rhythms (as in Turkish L1 speakers; Roncaglia-Denissen et
al., 2016). This relationship between musical rhythm and speech perception could rely on shared
cognitive functions (such as working memory), as well as on the ability to entrain to multiplexed
temporal scales, from the millisecond to second levels (Tierney & Kraus, 2015; Doelling &
Poeppel, 2015; Schön & Tillmann, 2015). Future studies could implement a longitudinal design
to demonstrate a causal effect of specific features of musical training (here, rhythm) on other
features of L2 acquisition (here, accent placement).
As noted above, previous findings have been mainly concerned with L2 perception, and not L2
production. One of the only studies to have investigated the effect of music skills on L2 production
showed that musical competence has an impact on phonological perception and production (Slevc
& Miyake, 2006). However, this study only tested melodic competence, and in terms of L2 produc-
tion it only tested segmental phonology. The present study is the first to investigate the effects of
musical expertise on lexical accent placement in L2 production, and to investigate its relationship
with both melodic and rhythmic perception and production skills. Similarly to the present study,
participants in Slevc and Miyake’s (2006) study (Japanese adults learning English) had an existing
L2 knowledge. This means that the L2 was, nonetheless, familiar to some degree, and correct stress
placement in the current study was thus also due to linguistic training. A distinction can therefore
be made with studies that have looked at the effect of musical expertise on the production of a
completely unknown language (Christiner & Reiterer, 2013, 2015; Christiner et al., 2018). Although
“sense of rhythm” was considered to play a role in the ability to imitate an unknown language
(Hindi), the authors of the 2013 study found that 66% of the speech imitation variance could be
explained by working memory capacity, possibly due to intrinsic high memory load when imitating
a completely unknown language. In this respect, an advantage of working with a known L2, as in
our case, is that it is easy to provide participants with a printed version of the heard sentences to be
reproduced, thus preventing a memory load bias.
Interestingly, we did not find any relationship between melodic performance and L2 accent
placement imitation success. This finding fits with the growing idea that rhythm plays a key role in
speech perception and production, and supports findings that rhythm—and not melody—is most
effective in language/speech therapy (Overy, Nicolson, Fawcett, & Clarke, 2003; Goswami, 2011;
Stahl, Kotz, Henseler, Turner, & Geyer, 2011; Flaugnacco et al., 2014). However, an analysis of
more global pronunciation skills (as in Christiner & Reiterer, 2015) might have revealed a relation-
ship with melodic aptitude (e.g., see Milovanov et al., 2008). Future studies could more closely
examine the relative contributions of different musical skills to different L2 skills, and how these
contributions differ according to the L2 being learned; and also in relation to the properties of one’s
L1 (see Roncaglia-Denissen et al., 2016).
The fact that L2 English proficiency (measured using the standard Cambridge test) was also
predictive of a correct prosodic production may simply reflect the fact that a more thorough
knowledge of the L2 implies heightened exposure, hence familiarity, with its prosody (see also
Cason et al. 11
D’Imperio & German, 2015). Even more interesting is that, while we would expect English pro-
ficiency to actually be the best predictor of L2 prosody production, the best predictor of the per-
formance on the most difficult items (i.e., penultimate stress) was rhythm production score. Future
studies should investigate the relationship between musical rhythmic skills and prosody produc-
tion using a known and an unknown L2 language so as to evaluate the effect of negative transfer.
Indeed, previous knowledge of L1 might interfere with new learning (L2), which may result in
establishing bad pronunciation habits that may not be present when testing another, unknown L2
(Odlin, 1989). It would also be interesting to compare imitation abilities with L2 that vary in their
linguistic distance to L1 (such as in D’Imperio & German, 2015, in which two typologically dif-
ferent prosodic systems were compared). For instance, in our study, some items were lexically
similar in L1 and L2, but had a different prosody (e.g., MInister/minIStre). Musical rhythmic
skills might therefore play a different role when there must be a process of reconfiguration of the
stress position with respect to L1 compared to when there is no lexical competition and no need
for stress pattern reconfiguration.
4.2 Theoretical and Practical Implications: A Common Processing of Meter
The implications of these findings are theoretically and practically relevant. From a theoretical
standpoint, our results show that metrical rhythmic patterns may be processed similarly for lan-
guage and music. Namely, participants who were more accurately able to reproduce musical
rhythms also showed an advantage in the realization of syllables with a disfavored stress location.
This finding extends and refines previous studies showing that musical expertise is correlated with
L2 skills (see Chobert & Besson, 2013, and Zeromskaite, 2014, for reviews), and suggests that
musical temporal aptitude may be linked to specific aspects of foreign language acquisition.
From a practical standpoint, these findings are interesting when considering the value of music-
based teaching techniques for foreign language teachers. Besides a general motivational benefit,
different features of music could be used to reinforce prosodic representations of the foreign lan-
guage being taught. Considering previous findings in L1 acquisition (Cason, Hidalgo, & Schön,
2015) and in children with reading impairments (Bhide et al., 2013; Flaugnacco et al., 2015),
rhythmic musical training can also be predicted to impact positively on L2 phonological perception
and production, too.
It has been shown that musical competence is not uniquely the result of music training, but of
many other cognitive and social factors (Swaminathan & Schellenberg, 2018). However, musi-
cians outperform nonmusicians in several musical skills, including temporal rhythmic skills
(Rammsayer & Altenmüller, 2006; Rammsayer, Buttkus, & Altenmüller, 2012; Schaal, Banissy, &
Lange, 2015; Wollman & Morillon, 2018). Thus, music training or music-based L2 learning, by
improving temporal processing at different levels, may in turn facilitate the learning of segmental
and suprasegmental features of an L2.
Importantly, different aspects of musical training may make different contributions to L2 acqui-
sition, depending on the language. For instance, we might expect to find similar results for Turkish
L1 speakers learning English L2, because Turkish has a word-final stress (Kabak & Vogel, 2001).
Similarly, several other L2 skills may instead benefit from pitch training, particularly in languages
in which pitch is more important (e.g., Mandarin). Finally, due to the metrical nature of French
prosody, French speakers may have less-rich representations of speech meter than speakers of
more prosodically variable languages, and may thus benefit more from a rhythmic music-based
teaching approach than might speakers of other languages. Future studies could investigate the
relationship of musical rhythmic skills and L2 prosodic skills in speakers whose L1 is more pro-
sodically variable. To conclude, while further research is required to specify the L2-specific links
12 Language and Speech 00(0)
with musical abilities, this study demonstrates a strong relationship between the perception and
production ability of L2 meter and musical rhythmic production skills.
Funding
This research was supported by grants ANR-16-CONV-0002 (ILCB), ANR-11-LABX-0036 (BLRI), ANR-
11-IDEX-0001-02 (A*MIDEX), and ANR 16-0012-01 (RALP) to D.S.
ORCID iD
Daniele Schön https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4472-4150
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Appendix A
Figure A2. Music notation of the stimuli used in the Melody Production test.
Figure A1. Music notation of the stimuli used in the Rhythm Production test.
Cason et al. 17
Appendix B. Linguistic corpus for the imitation task.
Utterances containing a trisyllabic word with a
stress on the first syllable
Utterances containing a trisyllabic word with a
stress on the second syllable
They spotted the criminal yesterday. I went to the casino yesterday.
Claire’s going to the festival today. They’ve felt some attraction lately.
Lisa will change the battery tomorrow. Justin gave some perspective yesterday.
They look for happiness everyday. They spoke to the detective yesterday.
Mary will open a gallery next year. We will create a new republic soon.
James spoke to the citizen last night. We have an appointment tomorrow.
They like the atmosphere very much. Sara hired a new assistant last month.
Ken will open a factory next month. We like potatoes a lot.
Peter will write an article tomorrow. They lost their objective in the end.
They had an accident last year. Jason’s felt some improvement lately.
We’ve found a new element lately. They got a new apartment last month.
They will take some holiday next month. They chose the other collection yesterday.
They talked about politics yesterday. They hired a new director last month.
We did the exercise last night. They had a good impression after all.
Claire will go to Africa next year. Laura found a solution last week.
Mike’s changed his attitude lately. They hired a new professor last year.
They went to the hospital yesterday. They will buy a new computer next month.
They met the minister yesterday. They started the production last year.
They changed their policy last year. We will elect a new committee next month.
They met with the government last month. They will call the inspector tomorrow.
“Fillers”
Mike will visit us tomorrow. They went to Japan last summer.
Janet will bring salmon tomorrow. She will start a new job next month.
Ken never reads his mails. They can come for dinner tonight.
Jerry went to the movies last night. I received the pictures yesterday.
He used to play the drums in this band last year. Jane traveled with her friend to India.
