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Musicians detect pitch violation in a foreig… [J Cogn Neurosci. 2007] – PubMed – NCBI
“The aim of this study was to determine whether musical expertise influences the detection of pitch variations in a foreign language that participants did not understand. To this end, French adults, musicians and nonmusicians, were presented with sentences spoken in Portuguese. The final words of the sentences were prosodically congruous (spoken at normal pitch height) or incongruous (pitch was increased by 35% or 120%). Results showed that when the pitch deviations were small and difficult to detect (35%: weak prosodic incongruities), the level of performance was higher for musicians than for nonmusicians. Moreover, analysis of the time course of pitch processing, as revealed by the event-related brain potentials to the prosodically congruous and incongruous sentence-final words, showed that musicians were, on average, 300 msec faster than nonmusicians to categorize prosodically congruous and incongruous endings. These results are in line with previous ones showing that musical expertise, by increasing discrimination of pitch–a basic acoustic parameter equally important for music and speech prosody–does facilitate the processing of pitch variations not only in music but also in language. Finally, comparison with previous results [Schön, D., Magne, C., & Besson, M. The music of speech: Music training facilitates pitch processing in both music and language. Psychophysiology, 41, 341-349, 2004] points to the influence of semantics on the perception of acoustic prosodic cues.”
tags: music language learning
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HowStuffWorks “Why do some people learn new languages easily and some don’t?”
“The attitude with which you approach the language is important, so if you can’t stand Chinese food, that may influence your performance in Mandarin class. On the other hand, if you’re motivated to learn Mandarin so that you can speak to your grandmother in her native tongue, you may find that you have an easier time picking it up. And immersion is also important — if you wake up in China one morning and need to get around by yourself, you may pick it up very quickly indeed. Teachers say that with enough hard work, motivation and practice, those who may not think they’re good at foreign language may end up being star pupils.”
tags: language learning
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Melodies that help:The relation between language aptitude and musical intelligence | Carmen Fonseca-Mora – Academia.edu
“Music and rhythm have been defined as powerful aids to language learning, memory, and recall. But isthis due to structural and motivational properties of instrumental music and songs or is there a relation between learners‟ language aptitude and musical intelligence? It seems that everyone who feels motivatedto do it is able to learn other languages to some degree as long as an appropriate learning method is used.However, learning foreign languages is not easy, as many variables need to be considered if the desiredresult is optimal language learning in a non bilingual environment. Probably, one of the main obstacles tolearning a foreign language in this context is the lack of continuous target language auditory input. Whilein first language acquisition babies start receiving sonorous stimuli in their mother‟s womb, in foreign language learning opportunities to receive auditory input are mainly limited to the classroom, the teacher,the classmates and situations in which listening is included in the lesson.”
tags: arts music language learning
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Musical training helps language processing, studies show
“In two Stanford studies, researchers demonstrated that people with musical experience found it easier than non-musicians to detect small differences in word syllables. They also discovered that musical training helps the brain work more efficiently in distinguishing split-second differences between rapidly changing sounds that are essential to processing language.”
tags: arts music language learning
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