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| The Journal of Asia TEFL |
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  Current Issue |
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Go List
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| Volume 22 Number 1, Spring 2025, Pages 1-202 |
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The Effect of Auditory Musical Rhythm as a Cue on L2 Pronunciation Learning and Its Relationship to Individual Differences
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Kaori Sugiura & Tomoko Hori
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This study investigated whether short-term training in musical rhythm enhances second language (L2) pronunciation skills, including rhythm, speaking rate, pitch range, and vowel length contrast (/ɪ/ and /i/). We also examined how pronunciation features interact in rhythmic training outcomes and how individual differences—language proficiency, phonological short-term memory (pSTM), and rhythmic ability—affect improvement. Twenty university students, all native Japanese speakers, participated in a pre-test, practice session, and post-test. They performed under two conditions in the practice session: a with-rhythm condition, in which they first repeated a musical rhythm that matched the rhythmic pattern of an auditorily presented sentence and then repeated the sentence, and a without-rhythm condition, in which sentences were repeated without rhythmic musical cues. Acoustic analyses showed that rhythmic priming significantly enhanced pronunciation, particularly in rhythm and vowel length contrast. Rhythm improvement correlated positively with vowel contrast but negatively with pitch range, suggesting cognitive load effects on speech processing. Moreover, individual differences influenced learning outcomes; pSTM predicted greater rhythm improvement in the with-rhythm condition, whereas English proficiency was a stronger predictor in the without-rhythm condition. These findings highlight the role of the pronunciation method using rhythmic priming in L2 phonetic instruction, particularly for duration-related pronunciation features, and emphasize the importance of tailoring this method to learners' cognitive profiles to optimize pronunciation learning.
Keywords: Rhythmic priming, Young adult learners, L2 pronunciation learning, Phonological short-term memory (pSTM), Rhythmic ability |
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The Journal of Asia TEFL
https://doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2025.22.1.5.84
