Language and music have long been known to share deep cognitive roots. Both rely on rhythm, timing, pitch perception, and finely tuned listening. Research from the University of Cambridge has highlighted how speech rhythm and musical rhythm rely on closely related auditory timing mechanisms, suggesting that the systems that help us follow a beat may also help us decode the rhythm of speech.

Because of this overlap, researchers have long suspected that musical skills might transfer to – and even be implicated in – language learning. A very recent study published in the journal Language Teaching explored this connection in more detail, and came up with a particularly intriguing finding: certain types of music training may actually improve a learner’s ability to imitate the sounds of unfamiliar languages.

Now if you’re like many in the polyglot community – me included – this will be, ahem, quite literally music to your ears. Overseas pop is a popular way to practise a language and connect with your target language culture. This new study confirms our suspicions on the utility of music in language learning. But rather than focusing on listening skills, it explores the potential benefits for second-language phonology.

The Study

The researchers started off with a simple question. Might different approaches to music training influence learners’ ability to reproduce unfamiliar speech sounds? To this end, participants completed a set of speech imitation tasks involving languages they did not know.

There were two ‘modes’ of musicality in the experiment. Some participants had a traditional, performance-based music background. Others, though, had experience with embodied music training in particular – learning rhythm and musical patterns through physical movement, body percussion, and coordinated actions.

The results were clear; learners with embodied music training performed significantly better at imitating unfamiliar speech sounds than those without it. The researchers concluded that embodied musical activities can have measurable benefits for pronunciation skills and speech imitation. That’s quite striking – whole body activity as a route to strengthening speaking skills.

Why Might Music Help?

The connection between music and language perception has been explored for years. If rhythm and melody enlist the same mental structures as linguistic information, it makes sense that musical activities might activate and strengthen the perceptual systems used for speech. These overlapping processing pathways have been the focus of ongoing study, and researchers are still in the process of mapping out their myriad networks.

This musical crossover is not a new finding, either. Work at the University of Edinburgh has examined how singing and musical presentation can support memory and learning in a foreign language. And other research has found that people with stronger musical rhythm perception tend to process speech rhythm more consistently, as shown in research published in the Journal of Laboratory Phonology.

Several mechanisms, then, might explain the effect observed in the study:

• Improved rhythm perception, which supports speech prosody
• Greater sensitivity to pitch variation, important for both tone and intonation
• Sensorimotor memory linking movement and sound
• Enhanced auditory attention during listening tasks

Speech, after all, is not just a sequence of sounds. It is a rhythmic and melodic system – something much closer to music than we often realise.

What This Means for Language Learners

So the takeaway from all this for language learners? Chiefly, musical activities that involve rhythm and movement may be particularly good at supporting pronunciation development. The participants were introduced to a particular type of music training, but this needn’t necessarily mean that formal music training is required. The authors’ discussion reinforces the value of quite general practices that play on the musical qualities of language.

Examples you might work into your own learning could include:

• shadowing spoken audio while gesticulating or signing the meaning of the words
• chanting or rhythmic repetition
• singing – vociferously – in the target language
• dancing whilst singing along to your favourite foreign pop!

It all reminds me of the ‘body parts’ games I’d use as a language teacher – heads, shoulders, knees and toes and such like. Those words would stick with students. The same kind of embodied approach has been used for other vocabulary items, a memory technique known as pegging, suggesting that the kinetic aspect is just as important as the musical one.

And of course, any excuse to make language learning more fun is a good one.