TY  - JOUR
A1  - Varnosfaderani, Shahaboddin Dabaghi
A1  - Shahnazari, Mohammadtaghi
A1  - Dabaghi, Azizollah
T1  - The influence of "happy" and "sad" background music on complexity, accuracy, and fluency of second-language speaking
T2  - Psychology of music
N2  - The role of music in second-language (L2) learning has long been the object of various empirical and theoretical inquiries. However, research on whether the effect of background music (BM) on language-related task performance is facilitative or inhibitory has produced inconsistent findings. Hence, we investigated the effect of happy and sad BM on complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of L2 speaking among intermediate learners of English. A between-groups design was used, in which 60 participants were randomly assigned to three groups with two experimental groups performing an oral L2 English retelling task while listening to either happy or sad BM, and a control group performing the task with no background music. The results demonstrated the happy BM group’s significant outperformance in fluency over the control group. In accuracy, the happy BM group also outdid the controls (error-free clauses, correct verb forms). Moreover, the sad BM group performed better in accuracy than the controls but in only one of its measures (correct verb forms). Furthermore, no significant difference between the groups in syntactic complexity was observed. The study, in line with the current literature on BM effects, suggests that it might have specific impacts on L2 oral production, explained by factors such as mood, arousal, neural mechanism, and the target task’s properties.
KW  - L2 speech
KW  - mood
KW  - arousal
KW  - working memory
KW  - task performance
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62503
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-625031
SN  - 1741-3087
N1  - Early View: Online Version before inclusion in an issue.
VL  - 2021
IS  - online version before inclusion in an issue
SP  - 1
EP  - 15
PB  - Sage
CY  - London
ER  -