What Makes a Foreign Language Intelligible? An Examination of the Impact of Musical Ability and Individual Differences on Language Perception and How Intelligible Foreign Languages Appear.

ABSTRACT: Previous research suggests that musical ability is associated with language processing and foreign language pronunciation. Whether musical ability is associated with the ability to generate intelligible unfamiliar utterances has not been investigated. Furthermore, how unfamiliar languages are perceived has rarely been related to musical ability. We tested 80 healthy adults, with a mean age of 34.05 and a combination of 41 women and 39 men. We used batteries of perceptual and generational music and language measures to assess foreign language intelligibility and musical capacity. Regression analysis revealed that five measures explained the variance in the intelligibility of unfamiliar foreign utterances. These were short-term memory capacity, melodic singing ability, speech perception abil

SUBMITTER: Christiner M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10057304 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature