| dc.description.abstract | Language experience is one way of measuring a person’s language proficiency, such that the more exposure a person has to various phrase structures in a given language, the better they will be at reading and comprehending it. We know that people gain language experience from reading, writing, and conversing, but little work has been done to investigate the contribution of music listening. Song lyrics are a form of language that we encounter often and that have an impact on the way we speak through the introduction of new phrases, to the way we understand when listening to music with lyrics not in our native language. To begin this work, we surveyed 58 participants aged 10-15 on the number of hours per week they spent reading, listening to music and on social media, what their favorite music artists were, and whether they considered lyrics to be important. Lyrics by each of the participant’s favorite artists were analyzed using natural language processing tools to determine frequency measures for the words found in their lyrics. It was hypothesized that the more people listened to artists who used words with low frequency scores in their lyrics, the more language experience that person would gain, and the more language experience seeking behavior they would exhibit, such that there would be a correlation between preference for artists who used words with low frequency scores in their lyrics, and an increased amount of time spent reading, although results did not indicate this. On average participants indicated that they listen to music for 15 hours per week. The number of hours participants spent listening to music per week correlated positively to the number of hours spent on social media, r(58) = .37, p < .01. It is possible that there is no relationship between the amount of time people spend reading and their music artist preference, but more work needs to be done to investigate why this might be. | |
