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LET THE MUSIC PLAY!

A Short-Term but No Long-Term Detrimental Effect of Vocal Background Music with Familiar Language Lyrics on Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2014

Annette M. B. de Groot  and
Hilde E. Smedinga
Annette M. B. de Groot*
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
Hilde E. Smedinga
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to the first author: Annette M. B. de Groot, University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychology, Weesperplein 4, 1018 XA Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Participants learned foreign vocabulary by means of the paired-associates learning procedure in three conditions: (a) in silence, (b) with vocal music with lyrics in a familiar language playing in the background, or (c) with vocal music with lyrics in an unfamiliar language playing in the background. The vocabulary to learn varied in concreteness (concrete vs. abstract) and phonological typicality of the foreign words’ forms (typical vs. atypical). When tested during and immediately after training, learning outcomes were poorer in the familiar language music condition than in the unfamiliar language music and silence conditions, but this effect was short-lived, as shown in a delayed test 1 week after training, on which the effect was no longer found. Learning outcomes were better for concrete words than for abstract words and better for typical foreign forms than for atypical ones. Contrary to the adverse effects of familiar language music, the effects of concreteness and typicality were lasting. We explain the interference effect in the familiar language music condition in terms of the workings of the phonological loop, a component of working memory involved in vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1990).

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 681 - 707
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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