The benefit of musical and linguistic expertise on language acquisition in sung material

Abstract

Musical learning and training appear to have large cross-domain transfer effects: they are beneficial in various cognitive domains including language. The present study aimed to examine the role of musical expertise in how musical and linguistic information contained in songs is used. However, as the superiority of musicians could be attributed to improvements in executive functions (e.g., Bialystok & DePape, 2009), we tried to isolate the role of musical training by comparing music experts to both non-experts and language experts. To this end we used the tasks proposed by Schön and colleagues (2008), who compared artificial language learning (ALL) based on spoken sequences to ALL based on sung sequences. These authors concluded that songs, more than speech, allow fast and strong learning. In contrast to Schön et al. (2008), the benefit of ALL based on songs was not found among non-experts in our study. However, there was a highly significant interaction between type of expertise and materials. The music experts were the only group to benefit from the matching of linguistic and musical information, hence showing a different profile than language experts. The present data thus confirm the specificity of transfer effects linked to musical expertise.