The role of musical aptitude in L2 Chinese word learning: Evidence from cross-situational statistical learning

Cross-domain transfer occurs between music and language when listeners process overlapping acoustic cues between speech and music. One speech feature that shares overlapping acoustic dimensions with music is lexical tone. However, lexical tones usually pose challenges for L2 learners with non-tonal native languages in learning tonal words, especially without explicit instructions, due to the absence of tonal cues in their phonological representations. One hypothesis based on cross-domain transfer between music and language is that better musical aptitude may modulate this tonal difficulty. This study tested this hypothesis by exploring whether and how music-to-language transfer facilitates L2 tonal word learning. We adopted a cross-situational word learning paradigm (CSWL) to test whether non-tonal language speakers could acquire tonal words without explicit instructions. Findings suggest that non-tonal speakers can use fine acoustic cues to learn tonal words by keeping track of cross-situational statistics and that musical aptitude (melodic perceptual ability) relates to tonal word learning for non-tonal speakers. Moreover, non-tonal learners could develop different levels of awareness regarding the pitch and duration of lexical tones, and awareness of acoustic cues could also predict non-tonal learners’ performance in CSWL.