The relation between musical ability and sentence-level intonation perception: A meta-analysis comparing L1 and non-native listening

Studies investigating the relationship between musical abilities and speech prosody report that musicians show an altered— often enhanced—perception of prosody, or report positive correlations between music perception and prosody perception. However, some studies on L1 perception find no such benefits, but show good prosody perception across listeners. In contrast, even advanced L2 users may show difficulties in processing sentence intonation. We hypothesised that musicality might especially be beneficial in challenging circumstances of non-native intonation perception. To test this, we conducted a meta-analysis of previous research investigating the effect of musical abilities on the perception of sentence-level intonation in L1, L2, and unfamiliar languages. Studies were systematically collected, and included various measures of musicality and intonation perception. The meta-analysis combining these outcomes showed a robust positive correlation between musical ability and intonation perception. This effect did not differ between studies on L1 and unfamiliar languages. We suggest intonation perception in unfamiliar languages might be relatively easy due to the absence of semantic interference. Data on L2 users was lacking. Because semantic processing plays a role in L2 perception, we suggest further research is needed to investigate the influence of musical ability on intonation perception in L2 listening.