The Influence of Aural Training in Music on the Perceptive Performance of Adult Learners’ Sound-Discrimination Abilities in an Unknown Foreign Language

Can aural training in music enhance your sound-discrimination abilities for languages? The study sets off to answer this question by testing 50 German-speaking students of non-linguistic degrees for their abilities to discriminate between sounds in Finnish, a language previously entirely unknown to them. 25 randomly selected subjects then went through an aural training in music for two weeks before all the subjects were retested in their aural-perceptive abilities in the Finnish language by means of a similar test containing different test items. The hypothesised positive effect of the musical intervention could be partially proved by a statistically significant mean enhancement in the final scores achieved by the trained group compared to an insignificant enhancement achieved by the control group.