Edited by: Jonathan B. Fritz, University of Maryland, United States
Reviewed by: L. Robert Slevc, University of Maryland, United States; Peter Schneider, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany
This article was submitted to Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Studies involving direct language imitation tasks have shown that pronunciation ability is related to musical competence and working memory capacities. However, this type of task may measure individual differences in many different linguistic dimensions, other than just phonetic ones. The present study uses an indirect imitation task by asking participants to a fake a foreign accent in order to specifically target individual differences in phonetic abilities. Its aim is to investigate whether musical expertise and working memory capacities relate to phonological awareness (i.e., participants’ implicit knowledge about the phonological system of the target language and its structural properties at the segmental, suprasegmental, and phonotactic levels) as measured on this task. To this end, French native listeners (
An analysis performed on the users of the language-learning app Busuu
A commonly faced issue in the research on pronunciation acquisition is the difficulty to isolate individual differences in pronunciation abilities from the influences of other linguistic factors. The present study proposes to exploit the rarely used accent faking paradigm in order to specifically target pronunciation abilities. During the experiment, German native speakers had to fake a French accent while speaking in German. We then tried to see whether in such an experimental context, working memory and musical abilities remained strong predictors of individual differences in pronunciation abilities.
People highly vary in their capacity to reach native-like pronunciation of a foreign language (
Direct imitation tasks suffer from several limitations. While imitating a second language they are familiar with, semantic or syntactic aspects of the sentences they have to repeat may distract imitators from focusing on the pronunciation itself. Similarly, while imitating a language they have never heard (
Direct imitation tasks, because they mimic a learning mechanism which children exploit to acquire their first language (
Uses of accent faking accent tasks are rare and usually serve the purpose of examining phonological awareness of specific features (
Correlations between pronunciation abilities and music processing have long been established (
Singing ability is a particularly strong predictor of pronunciation abilities (
Performance on accent faking tasks depends on the developmental stage of participants’ oro-motor system (
In sum, because musical expertise and singing ability seem to relate to better speech perception and articulation capacity, we expect them to correlate with both direct imitation tasks and accent faking tasks.
According to
Imitation tasks tax the phonological loop because this component is responsible for maintaining active verbal information over short periods of time. Such a task should indeed involve subvocal articulatory rehearsal mechanisms. Moreover, neuroscientific research suggests an overlap between the regions for phonological working memory and the areas subserving speech perception and production (
Importantly, music competence may enhance working memory capacities. For instance, auditory working memory relates to musical abilities (
Because accent faking tasks rely on long-term memories (
In sum, accent faking tasks allow to exclusively target pronunciation abilities and intermediate achievement in second language pronunciation since they assess previously stored phonetic knowledge. Thus, identifying the predictors of performance in faking accent allows assessing what influences retrieval and use of phonetic knowledge but does not allow for the identification of the predictors of pronunciation learning.
We conducted an exploratory study in order to investigate whether intermediate achievement in foreign pronunciation ability would be predicted by (1) musical perceptual and productive abilities;
(2) working memory capacities.
We expected accent faking abilities to correlate with both perceptual and productive musical expertise since this task requires participants to have a good articulation capacity (
Such a pattern of results would allow drawing a distinction between resources that are required during learning of new phonetic and phonological material as opposed to the ones learners need in order to retrieve the knowledge after initial storage.
To target individual differences in accent faking, we recruited German native speakers (
The participants (
Participants read the following sentence sentence:
“Er hat seinem alten Vater damit keinem Gefallen getan.”
The participants read only one sentence for parsimony of testing design. The task was to be performed online and we wanted to make sure to keep it short enough for participants to persevere and complete the entire task.
All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine Tübingen, Project identification code 529/2009BO2.
The recordings of the French accent faking task were rated by French native (
Participants performed the AMMA test and self-reports of their singing ability. The AMMA test [Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (
To analyze the subjects’ singing ability, the participants performed a self-assessment of their singing ability. To this end, they answered two questions: (1) how well can you sing? (2) how much do you like to sing? by giving a grade between 1 (not at all) and 5 (very much). We decided to measure singing ability with self ratings because patterns of results obtained with this measurement method (
Participants did three phonological working memory tasks: a Wechsler digit span task (backward and forward) and a non-word repetition task. The first one is a subcomponent of a German version of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (
We adopted a relatively simple analytical design since we used a correlational approach to identify the markers of accent faking abilities.
First of all, a high degree of inter-rater reliability was found on the accent faking task. The average measure ICC (intra-class correlation coefficient) was 0.932 with a 95% confidence interval from 0.899 to 0.958 [
Descriptive statistics regrouping all the variables.
Descriptive statistics | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
French score | 7.86 | 7.28 | 0.00 | 25.00 |
Singing ability | 3.06 | 1.21 | 1.00 | 5.00 |
Singing like | 3.69 | 1.16 | 1.00 | 5.00 |
Musicality tonal | 25.94 | 5.42 | 16.00 | 37.00 |
Musicality rhythm | 29.14 | 4.07 | 21.00 | 39.00 |
Musicality total | 55.09 | 9.13 | 39.00 | 76.00 |
WM total | 16.31 | 3.34 | 9.00 | 22.00 |
WM forward | 8.89 | 2.41 | 4.00 | 14.00 |
WM backward | 7.40 | 1.70 | 4.00 | 10.00 |
WM non-words | 6.49 | 1.92 | 3.00 | 11.00 |
Self-estimation French | 2.06 | 1.41 | 0.00 | 5.00 |
Instruction length | 3.89 | 2.41 | 0.00 | 9.00 |
Results of the correlational analysis.
Correlations (Spearman) |
|||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
French score | Singing ability | Singing like | Musicality tonal | Musicality rhythm | Musicality total | Working memory | Working memory forward | Working memory backward | Working memory non-words | ||
French score | 1 | 0.40** | 0.34* | 0.39* | 0.40** | 0.41** | 0.11 | 0.11 | –0.06 | 0.18 | |
Singing ability | 0.40** | 1 | 0.73** | 0.27 | 0.24 | 0.25 | 0.17 | 0.18 | 0.00 | 0.13 | |
Singing like | 0.34* | 0.73** | 1 | 0.20 | 0.19 | 0.20 | 0.00 | –0.08 | 0.01 | 0.24 | |
Musicality tonal | 0.39* | 0.27 | 0.20 | 1 | 0.83** | 0.96** | 0.10 | 0.03 | 0.15 | 0.26 | |
Musicality rhythm | 0.40** | 0.24 | 0.19 | 0.83** | 1 | 0.94** | 0.14 | 0.05 | 0.17 | 0.27 | |
Musicality total | 0.41** | 0.25 | 0.20 | 0.96** | 0.94** | 1 | 0.10 | 0.01 | 0.16 | 0.27 | |
Working memory | 0.11 | 0.17 | 0.00 | 0.10 | 0.14 | 0.10 | 1 | 0.86** | 0.73** | 0.27 | |
Working memory forward | 0.11 | 0.18 | –0.08 | 0.03 | 0.05 | 0.01 | 0.86** | 1 | 0.32* | 0.16 | |
Working memory backward | –0.06 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.15 | 0.17 | 0.16 | 0.73** | 0.32* | 1 | 0.26 | |
Working memory non-words | 0.18 | 0.13 | 0.24 | 0.26 | 0.27 | 0.27 | 0.27 | 0.16 | 0.26 | 1 | |
Self-estimation French | 0.35* | 0.38* | 0.24 | 0.34* | 0.16 | 0.24 | 0.00 | –0.01 | –0.07 | 0.23 | |
Instruction length | 0.14 | 0.15 | 0.02 | 0.21 | 0.01 | 0.14 | 0.10 | 0.08 | 0.06 | 0.22 |
Correlation of speakers’ musical abilities on the two parts of the Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (AMMA) test with the French faking scores.
Correlation of speakers’ singing ability with the French faking scores.
Absence of correlation between the working memory scores and the French faking score.
In a nutshell, the task was efficient in detecting individual differences in pronunciation ability since some participants were clearly better than others at faking a French accent. The correlational analysis showed that pronunciation achievement as measured on an accent faking task correlates with musical expertise but not with working memory capacities.
The results of the present investigation corroborate that musical abilities, here music perception and singing ability, could account for individual differences in accent faking abilities. These correlations substantiate the previously reported links between individual differences in pronunciation ability and musical perception (
Enhanced productive musical abilities also relate to high performance on the task as indicated by the relationship between French accent faking scores and the answers given to the singing ability self-assessment questionnaire. This is in line with research which identified singing ability as a strong predictor of imitation ability (
Since musical expertise relates to performance on both direct imitation tasks (
There were no correlations between performance on the working memory tasks and results on the French accent faking task. At first glance, it could be surprising since the “phonological loop is used for short term retention of verbal information and is a necessary prerequisite for
Measuring intermediate achievement enriches traditional approaches assessing learning of unfamiliar material. Indeed, these other approaches are concerned with potential and do not allow concluding about achievement. However, the present results do not discard the contribution of working memory to language learning. Rather, if the present task seemed not to tax this cognitive resource, initial storage of the invoked phonetic items most likely did. This would be in line with the fact that the role of working memory could be to transform transient phonetic events into rehearsable phonetic representations (
Although music competence appears to enhance working memory capacities (
Limitations of the present study include the fact that we do not have information about participants’ exposure to French which did not result from an instructional context. This is problematic since some of the participants were able to fake a French accent but did not report having had French instruction. It suggests that these subjects were able to form phonetic and phonological representations via exposure to French in other contexts. It would be interesting to give participants a more detailed questionnaire in order to evaluate, which is the minimum amount of exposure to the target language necessary in order to gain reliable phonological awareness. In addition, multiple faking tasks performed in different languages should be introduced so that social distance, educational influence and aptitude for faking accents could be contrasted more precisely. Further research may also benefit from assessing subjects’ singing ability by having them sing during the experiment and their singing performance being rated by professional singers (see for instance,
Our task showed that phonological awareness at intermediate achievement stages is linked to productive and perceptual musical abilities but not to working memory capacities. This leads to hypothesize that working memory could be recruited during learning (which may happen during direct imitation tasks), but not during retrieval and use of previously stored knowledge. Musical expertise, on the contrary, may advantage people both when storing new knowledge as well as when retrieving it on accent faking tasks for instance. Theoretically, the study provides some support for the idea that perception and production representations are shared. This would allow accounting for the link between musical and mimicry abilities and would explain the often-observed interaction between perception and production. Our results also show that individual differences in pronunciation abilities are not all due to variations in working memory.
This has both research- and pedagogically oriented consequences. First, accent faking tasks, which remain underexploited so far, can be used in order to assess (intermediate) achievement in learning foreign pronunciation. Moreover, this task seems to be useful to get rid of the influence of working memory and specifically target pronunciation abilities. Secondly, our results suggest that musical training should be included in language teaching in order to support learning of foreign language pronunciation and retrieval and later use of this acquired knowledge. Practicing singing, for instance, could facilitate second language pronunciation acquisition by increasing one’s awareness of sound production, by developing perceptual capacities and by supporting long-term storage of accurate foreign sound representations.
MCh is a recipient of a DOC-team-fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
MCo and SR contributed to the conception and design of the study. MCo ran the experiments. MCo and MCh organized the database. MCh performed the statistical analysis. MCo wrote the first draft of the manuscript. MCh and SR wrote sections of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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