2024 Volume 47 Issue 2 Pages 23-38
Music plays an important role in English language education, especially in elementary schools. In recent years, a great amount of research has been conducted in fields such as neuroscience, music psychology, and cognitive psychology, attempting to elucidate the relationship between music and other cognitive activities, including foreign language learning. This study explores the relationship between musical background and auditory discrimination ability of phonetically similar English words, reporting the results of a small-scale investigation conducted with Japanese learners of English. Musical background was defined as the “fondness” of the school music education learners had received in schools and as the “amount” of musical activities they had conducted outside of school. Also, a performance test was conducted to assess the auditory discrimination ability of English-similar sounds. Data analysis revealed that approximately 36% of the variance in auditory discrimination performance for phonetically similar English words may be accounted for by the “fondness” of school music education at the elementary school level and the “degree” of out-ofschool music activities at the university level. Such a relationship is examined from the perspective of learning transfer.
