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.
