Relevance of Musical Training to Second-Language Acquisition

In today’s globalized world, efficient communication with parties of other cultures is proving to be increasingly significant. As Mandela said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart,” and its benefits in the working world has increased the demand for multilingualism in today’s job market. Naturally, more people try to speak more languages if only to raise their probabilities of getting hired. The process of learning a language that is not his or her first and/or native tongue is referred to as the process of second-language acquisition (SLA). In this paper, I will argue that SLA engages the brain in several stages of cognitive processes that can be enhanced and accelerated by musical training. Previously published works of psychology and neuroimaging studies have revealed the overwhelming amount of overlapping features and the shared and parallel cognitive processes involved in music and language processing and this has led me to hypothesize that musical training can both accelerate and enhance the SLA process in the ways that have already been theorized by Anderson and Schmidt (the Automaticity Theory, 1992; the Noticing Hypothesis, 1990).