Can songs or beat help learners to discriminate lexical stress in a foreign language?

Previous studies revealed that songs can help foreign language learners to recall vocabulary (Ludke, Ferreira, & Overy, 2014; Salcedo, 2010; Tegge, 2015), to segment speech (Schön et al., 2008) and to perceive fine segmental or suprasegmental differences (Lakshminarayanan & Tallal, 2007; Moradi & Shahrokhi, 2014). However, little is known about the effect of the use of music on foreign lexical stress perception (Kolinsky, Cuvelier, Goetry, Peretz, & Morais, 2009). This acquisition is often problematic for speakers of a language that does not contain lexical stress (Dupoux, Sebastián-Gallés, Navarrete, & Peperkamp, 2008). Moreover, it is still unclear whether the use of music is equally beneficial to learners with and without musical training (Larrouy-Maestri, Leybaert, & Kolinsky, 2013). In our research, we examined whether foreign language lexical stress can be facilitated by the use of a melody or a beat and whether the musical profile of the learners interacts with the perception. We tested two groups of French learners of Dutch: one group of musicians and non-musicians (N = 46) and one group of learners of Dutch at the university (N = 80).They all performed a XAB discrimination task: they heard stimuli of three Dutch words and non-words varying in the position of the word stress and mentioned which of the two last matched with the first one. The stimuli were either naturally spoken, either spoken with a beat on the stress (rhythmical stimuli), either sung (musical stimuli). After the perception tests, participants filled in questionnaires to evaluate their musical profile. Results show that accuracy rate of lexical stress perception is higher for musical stimuli than for rhythmical or spoken stimuli, and for musicians compared to non-musicians.