The relation between musical abilities and focus prosody in second-language speech production by tone and non-tone language speakers

Trials elicited contrastive focus on either an adjective or noun. Participants performed this task in their L1 and L2, and completed a music perception test. We measured the F0 contours, duration, and intensity of the target words and compared these acoustic cues in speakers’ L1 and L2 productions.

Results showed that musical abilities are related to a more target-like L2 focus marking in the L1 Dutch group, specifically regarding the shape of focus-marking F0 contours. Musical abilities did not play a role in L2 English focus marking in the L1 Mandarin group, which suggests that musical abilities may not play a role if the L2 speakers have an L1 tone-language background, or if there are large prosodic differences between the L1 and L2.

These findings thus suggest that the extent to which L2 prosody production is related to individual differences in musical abilities may depend on the prosodic characteristics of the speakers’ L1.