This might seem like an odd question, perhaps, but I have a hypothesis that people with musical ability may in some way have an advantage in language acquisition past the period of childhood where learning new languages is easy and natural.
Musicians are accustomed to dealing with sound – hearing pitch differences, tonal shifts, rising and falling sounds, length distinctions, emphasis, volume and so on. While this doesn’t translate 1:1 to language, it seems that, for instance, a musician might have an edge in hearing (if not necessarily producing) the distinction between tones in tonal languages compared to non-musician speakers of their shared non-tonal native language. The same with a vowel length distinction, while it still may take some effort, music users are “accustomed” to hearing and producing the difference between a sixteenth note and an eighth note at various speeds. I want to make clear that this is still likely to be a difficult task, the question is more whether there’s a measurable edge – not an assertion that English speaking musicians should be able to pick up Cantonese over the weekend if they’re bored.
I also wonder about wind instrument players and especially singers who have somewhat finer control over their mouth (and in the case of singer, general noise-producing) muscles – I wonder if they have any advantage in learning to produce (or even hear for singers?) new sounds not in their language (or a subset of sounds, at least).
I don’t think I found the secret of language learning here or anything, it’s simply a hypothesis, but I’m curious if there’s been any research done into this and what the conclusions are if so.
And, as the title says, this question is about verbal language acquisition. I don’t think that knowing music would particularly help in learning signed languages, conductor arm-waving notwithstanding (:p), but it could be interesting if for some reason being a musician helps with signed and verbal languages equally well and what the reasons for that are.
Learning a language is not only (or even importantly) a matter of learning to produce the sounds of the new language. I have known several native speakers of a Chinese language whose English was good, even, in one case, quite elegant, but whose pronunciation was atrocious. Learning a language is primarily a matter of absorbing the syntax and the vocabulary. It would not all surprise me if professional singers learned better accents. Although one can pronounce a foreign language much better when singing and thereby massaging every syllable, than in ordinary speech. I once witnessed a rock group singing in what sounded like a hillbilly accent that they had obviously learned by heart. They didn’t even speak English.
My language ability is above average; my auditory processing powers are uncommonly poor for someone without a learning disability.
As a child I was unable to even comprehend the idea of “rhythm” without tying it to a physical act (hit a drum… Jump rope, etc) , and couldn’t hear rhythm in music until I trained myself to mentally tie it to the physical motions of horse back riding and thus learned to hear rhythm as an adult. In addition, I was also an utter, miserable failure at piano lessons my parents imposed. What I am trying to say here is my musical ability is waaaaay below normal. As a side note I am virtually certain my mother is tone-deaf – she can’t sing “happy birthday” with anything like recognizable tones - its like she sings at random – and I think I got my nonabity from her.
Now in the language arena I usually get compliments on my accents and find language to be an interesting and engaging subject. I pick up languages and accents quite easily compared to others. I’ll note that my father has a genius for language, speaks like 5 languages fluently, another dozen conversationally… most from unstructured selfstudy. He has no special skill or interest in music or singing. I dont have his ability but I seem to be on the high side of normal.
So, I’d have to say your theory does not apply to me.
I’m sorry I can’t supply any data, but I have experience teaching languages, and learning languages myself.
In my experience, everyone really does learn in a different way. For languages, there are so many ways that people can learn. For some people it’s the rigid grammar, for some it’s like algorithms from other languages, for some it’s seeing words written, for some it’s communicating with people so they pick up on body language, for some it’s memorising endlessly and for some it’s all in the sound. I’m pushing to extremes here, most people learn with combinations of all of this (and far more, that I don’t even know), and if you really only learn one way you probably won’t learn very well or very easily.
Having a better developed ability in one area would likely help your learning in that way. People often ask me why I learn languages easily, and I think it’s because I’m fairly good at all those methods.
So in a way, yes. Musical ability is, in my limited experience, associated with a certain ability to learn languages, in a certain way. I don’t think it necessarily leads to better language learning in general. The ability to reproduce sounds is useful, and getting a feeling for rhythm and tone and what they convey is important. But there is much more to it than that, it’s just a starting point.
Perhaps: all else being equal, a person with more musical ability might learn a language better and slightly more easily than someone with less developed musical ability?
Kinda like: all else being equal, a person with a better memory will learn a language better and with more ease than someone with worse memory? - etc