The Complicated Relationship Between Music and Foreign Language Learning: Nuanced Conditions Required for Cognitive Benefits Due to Music

Many people enjoy listening to music while they study, but others find music distracting. Research about the effect of music on performance during a cognitive task mirrors the equivocal nature of this subjective debate. Across 3 experiments, music, either in the background or as an active encoding device, was found to have no effect on foreign language learning. In Experiment 1, participants studied foreign language vocabulary in silence, while listening to instrumental music, or while listening to music with lyrics. There was no effect of music on recall at immediate (p = .52) or delayed testing (p = .80). Participants in Experiments 2 and 3 listened to and then repeated foreign language phrases by speaking or singing them aloud. No significant differences were found in recall for phrases learned by singing and for phrases learned by speaking (p = .827). Experiment 3 assessed whether using a self-composed melody as a musical mnemonic device was more effective than singing a given melody in learning foreign language phrases. Recall for foreign language phrases sung to given melodies was not significantly different than recall for phrases sung to self-composed melodies at any retention interval (all pvalues > .50). Despite finding only null results, this research sheds light on the question of when music may be successfully employed to enhance learning and suggests that familiarity of the music and difficulty of the learning task may be important factors. MUSIC AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING 3 The Complicated Relationship Between Music and Foreign Language Learning: Nuanced Conditions Required for Cognitive Benefits Due to Music In studying difficult information, people can use mnemonic devices, which are learning techniques, to help trigger information about a particular concept. For example, mnemonic devices might involve rhymes, imagery, or even music to help us remember information. Music as a learning tool is something that we may have encountered at a very early age through nursery rhymes, such as using the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” to help us remember the sequence of the letters in the alphabet. So it is not surprising that music is thought by some to be useful in trying to remember information. However, while some people love using music as a way to focus their attention and block out external noise, others find music distracting when they are trying to study. Interestingly, this subjective debate about study preferences mirrors the equivocal nature of the research: there is conflicting evidence as to whether the presence of music helps or hinders performance on a cognitive task. The present study examined the use of music as a mnemonic technique. Researchers have explored the impact of background music on cognitive performance. As an example, Schellenberg (2005) found that participants who sang or listened to music prior to a cognitive assessment, such as a test of spatial skills or processing speeds, performed better than participants who sat in silence. This effect was found to be mediated by mood and arousal: participants who preferred listening to a story over music showed the same cognitive benefits when listening to stories as did participants who found music more arousing when they heard music. This finding implied that while music in itself may not have a benefit, it may still yield improvements in performance by providing increased levels of arousal to listeners. MUSIC AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING 4 In contrast to the Schellenberg (2005) finding that the effect of music is mediated by arousal and mood, other researchers suggest that there is something unique about the rich structure of music beyond mere stimulation that leads to increased performance. An experiment by Wallace (1994) found music to enhance verbatim recall both at immediate testing and after a 20 min delay when the words being learned were presented through song. Participants who heard three verses of a ballad sung to the same melody recalled a greater percentage of the lyrics than did participants who heard these same three verses spoken. Importantly, participants in the music condition also performed better than participants who heard the text spoken rhythmically to the backdrop of a constant beat, which likely also provided stimulation; this showed that music was still beneficial even when controlling for arousal. However, other studies have shown that not only can music be stimulating, but that this stimulation might be distracting too. Hughes, Rudin-Brown, and Young (2012) found that both listening to music and singing along to music decreased performance on a simulated driving task compared to baseline driving performance in the absence of music. Similarly, Brodsky and Slor (2013) found that novice drivers drove less safely when they listened to their preferred music in the car than when they drove without music. These experiments highlighted that music is not always beneficial in performing cognitive tasks: in fact, it might provide a severe disadvantage compared to silence. However, Brodsky and Slor (2013) also found that alternative music to the drivers’ listening preferences was less distracting. Participants displayed fewer deficient driving behaviors when listening to the alternative music, which was designed to minimize distracting features such as melodies and lyrics. Thus, even seemingly minor changes in the stimuli were able to alter whether music provided cognitive benefits or whether it was distracting. MUSIC AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING 5 Indeed, in the same study that found music to enhance recall for ballad verses, Wallace (1994) found the opposite effect in follow-up experiments when there were seemingly only minor changes in the stimuli and procedure. In the first follow-up study, participants heard only one verse of the ballad, in contrast to the three that they had heard in the original experiment. This time, participants who had heard the ballad spoken recalled a greater percentage of the lyrics than participants who had heard it set to a melody. This might have been because participants did not have a chance to become familiar with the melody because they only heard it once, so they were not able to use it to their advantage to encode the lyrics. This explanation also makes sense in light of the second follow-up study. In the second follow-up study, participants heard three verses of a ballad just as before, but participants in the music condition heard each verse set to a different tune, rather than hearing three verses in a row that reflected the same melodic pattern, as was the case in the original experiment. Again, participants in the music condition performed worse than those who heard the verses spoken, likely due to their limited exposure to each melody. Although participants did not benefit from the musical presentation of the stimuli in these follow-up experiments, there is still more evidence that music can be helpful at any stage of the learning process. Whereas Schellenberg (2005) found that listening to music before completing a cognitive task may improve scores, and Wallace (1994) showed that under the right conditions, the presence of music during the studying process can provide a benefit, another study highlighted that music may even provide an improvement in performance when it is presented after studying. An experiment by Judde and Rickard (2010) found that participants who listened to a musical excerpt 20 min after studying a list of 30 words performed better on a recall test a week after studying the list than did participants who had not listened to music. Thus, music presented postMUSIC AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING 6 learning may also have cognitive benefits, such as increased long-term memory. Yet Judde and Rickard (2010) also found that the effect was not present for participants who listened to music immediately after studying or 45 min after studying. Clearly, the findings were very mixed: while music has been found to confer a cognitive benefit, very specific conditions must be met in order to enable participants to use music as a tool to their advantage rather than finding the music distracting. In most of the above studies, participants were passive listeners. Even in the Schellenberg (2005) and the Hughes et al. (2012) experiments where participants sang the music, the content that they were singing was not related to the criteria that they were tested on. However, a recent study by Ludke, Ferreira, and Overy (2013) had participants actively singing the content they were studying. In the Ludke et al. (2013) study, one group of participants was instructed to sing the material that they were learning, while other groups merely spoke the same material or spoke it rhythmically. Participants were then tested on the Hungarian phrases they had studied using a variety of recall measures to assess whether singing could be an effective learning tool. The researchers found that participants who studied phrases by singing them aloud were better able to recall the phrases than participants who had practiced by speaking the phrases or by speaking the phrases in rhythm. These findings suggested that singing could be an effective tool in facilitating learning. The present research most closely aligned with the Ludke et al. (2013) methodology. In the present study, I sought to replicate and extend the Ludke et at. (2013) finding that in studying material, singing the material during study can improve recall. The present study used a series of three experiments to test the connection between using music and learning foreign languages, as one example of how music might improve performance on a cognitive task. Through this work, I MUSIC AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING 7 sought to address three central questions: (1) does the presence of music help or hinder when performing a cognitive task? (2) is music more effective when it is used as part of the encoding process rather than