Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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There are large individual differences among late second language learners. The present study investigated whether individual differences in late L2 acquisition could be explained by individual...Show moreThere are large individual differences among late second language learners. The present study investigated whether individual differences in late L2 acquisition could be explained by individual differences in musical experience, because a large number of prior studies showed that musicians have enhanced auditory processing abilities. Dutch late-learners of English performed an AXB identification task, a 4I2AFC discrimination task and a passive oddball task with the English vowel contrast DRESS-TRAP. Data was analyzed with a multilevel single-trial approach to focus on the explanation of individual differences. The results showed large individual differences in all three tasks, good behavioral discrimination of the vowel contrast, and a large mismatch negativity (MMN) effect. A relation between discrimination performance and the variables musical experience and MMN amplitude was found, indicating that better behavioral discrimination of small acoustic differences was related to more musical experience and larger MMN differences. The absence of a similar relation with identification performance was attributed to a ceiling effect and restricted range of results on this task. The fact that no significant relation was found between musical experience and MMN amplitude, was explained by the required discrimination difficulty to measure a positive effect of musical experience, which was not met by the stimuli in the oddball task.Show less
