| I found an article about Dr. Daniel Schon, investigator at the Institut de Neurociences Cognitives de la M�diterran�e in France, where the idea that foreign languages are easier to learn when sung was presented and I couldn’t help but to read it.� A study has been completed showing that hearing foreign words in songs can help to learn languages.� I thought of how teenagers catch up new vocabulary so quickly and learn to speak as fast a native speaker and, you all know what a native speaker sounds like when you're trying to get to grips with a foreign language… The words seem to roll off their tongue so fast that you can't even tell one word from the next! The researchers created a set of six nonsense words made up from a choice of 11 syllables and then they used a speech synthesizer to play a continuous stream of these words in random order to 26 French-speaking participants. Then, words were presented alongside words formed from the same choice of syllables. The participants had to identify the words that had appeared in the original recording, but they were hopeless, as they had guessed. Next, a second recording was created but each syllable was sung by the synthesizer at a different pitch. A new group of 26 participants had to identify the original words from new ones, and this time they achieved 64% accuracy. The researchers concluded that learning a foreign language, especially in the first learning phase where one needs to segment new words, may largely benefit from the motivational and structuring properties of music in songs as it is more emotionally engaging and, together with clues from phonetics, it provides a source of statistical information about which syllables tend to follow each other in words, and which ones don't. � |
