From Notes to Vowels: The influence of musical experience on English vowel production by Dutch native speakers

Persistent URL of this record https://hdl.handle.net/1887/4108728

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Taalwetenschap (BA)

Oosterhoff, Marloes (2024)

From Notes to Vowels: The influence of musical experience on English vowel production by Dutch native speakers

Bachelor thesis | Taalwetenschap (BA)

The present study explored the effects of musical experience on the L2-pronunciation of English vowels by Dutch native speakers. It was expected that a higher degree of musical experience would produce a more native-like pronunciation. Native Dutch speakers (n=100) produced the North Wind and the Sun passage three times. From these recordings two selected vowels, /u:/ and /ʊ/ were compared to native English productions (n=6). Statistical analyses revealed no significant effects of musical experience, vowel type and the interaction between the two on the distance between the formant values produced by the L2 English production of Dutch natives and the production of English native speakers. The lack of significant effects can be attributed to the lack of participants with a high amount of musical experience. Further research is necessary to fully understand the effect of musical experience on the accuracy of vowel production in a second language.

Linguistics

Second Language Acquisition

Music

Speech Learning Model

Pronuciation

Critical Period Hypothesis

Musical Experience

OPERA

OPERA Hypothesis