Can music influence language learning? The case of hip-hop.

I came across an interesting article in PloS ONE this week that I thought you may enjoy, dear reader. The article is written by a linguist, Paula Chesley, from the University of Alberta in Canada and asks the question, ‘Has Mainstream American English (MAE) been influenced by the vocals in hip-hop’. The research has implications for our understanding of how musical traditions influence mainstream language development within a culture.

It is not a surprising fact that speakers acquire vocabulary by watching films or TV, but there is not a great deal of evidence that listening to music has a similar influence. On top of this, the present paper argues that hip-hop is especially problematic as a test case for an effect on language development due to a number of issues:

1) Hip-hop albums rarely include lyric sheets (more likely in pop and rock albums)

2) The fast pace of rappers can often impair comprehension of the words uttered.

3) The voice quality, often in shouting timbre, can also impair comprehension of the exact lyrics.

4) Hip-hop is full of atypical syntax, double entendres, and deliberately obscure language, which can include mixtures of two or more languages.

So there are a number of factors that mean that hip-hop in particular creates ‘excruciatingly difficult’ conditions for lyric comprehension and transcription, and subsequent vocabulary acquisition (Devlin, 2010). Given these difficulties, why might we suspect that hip-hop is influencing language?

Young adults listen to more music than previously recorded generations in America and hip-hop has now evolved into widely available mainstream music. It is also one of the most popular video media music genres and there are a number of websites devoted to documenting the slang and ‘urban language’ that is used by different hip-hop artists.

The study set out to test 166 non-African American young people’s understanding of ‘African American English (AAE)’ terms, which are frequently used in hip-hop. She hypothesised that a higher level of familiarity with hip-hop would be correlated with a higher level of understanding of AAE vocabulary.

The dense multiple regression linear analysis revealed that three main factors predicted knowledge of hip-hop AAE: musical preferences, weak social ties to African Americans (negatively), and knowledge of popular culture. Specifically, listening to more hip-hop and knowledge of African American social culture (e.g. TV shows with a majority AAE speaking characters) were related to a higher comprehension of hip-hop AAE language. Conversely gender, age, ethnicity and hometown had no significant influences on the results.

 Did any particular artist have an influence? Did popularity of artists have an effect? The results revealed that general use of a hip-hop term most strongly predicted vocabulary acquisition; so the more that a word is used in a similar context by different artists, the more likely it is to be picked up in general language acquisition. But there was also a predictive relationship between preferred hip-hop artist and knowledge of words used by that artist.

Overall the results indicate that people can acquire vocabulary by listening to hip-hop and that this process is influenced by factors including cultural knowledge, social ties and musical preferences.

The next step would be to carry out controlled experimental studies to determine more reliably how exposure factors influence vocabulary acquisition. The author believes that knowledge of AAE used in hip-hop music may be linked to music listening preferences even if peer group usage and media exposure could be controlled in a systematic way. Further work can test this hypothesis more directly.

This study utilises a comprehensive modelling analysis and draws on linguistic methodological traditions to answer an ecologically valid and interesting psychological question – can the dynamic processes of language acquisition and evolution be influenced by exposure to music? The paper makes a good case for a direct influence in one of the most difficult vocal genres, hip-hop.

Article: Chesley, P. (2012) You know what it is: Learning words through listening to hip hop.