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Can aural training in music enhance your sound-discrimination abilities for languages? The study sets off to answer this question by testing 50 German-speaking students of non-linguistic degrees for their abilities to discriminate between sounds in Finnish, a language previously entirely unknown to them. 25 randomly selected subjects then went through an aural training in music for two weeks before all the subjects were retested in their aural-perceptive abilities in the Finnish language by means of a similar test containing different test items. The hypothesised positive effect of the musical intervention could be partially proved by a statistically significant mean enhancement in the final scores achieved by the trained group compared to an insignificant enhancement achieved by the control group.
List of contents
Contents: The influence of aural training in music on the perceptive performance of adult learners' sound-discrimination abilities - The interconnectivity of language and music from the neuroscientific, the developmental-psychological and the pedagogical points of view - The role of sound-discrimination abilities in speech perception and language learning - Methods for the testing of sound-discrimination abilities - Methods for testing and training of musical listening skills.
About the author
Friederike Flottmann studied Music and English at the University of Dortmund from 1998 to 2003. After working as a private tutor for English, violin and piano and as a translator for English, French and Nordic languages, she started the traineeship in teaching in 2009. She worked abroad, for example in Canada, Norway and Australia, and completed numerous international orchestra courses.
