Rhythmic Abilities Correlate with L2 Prosody Imitation Abilities in Typologically Different Languages.

While many studies have demonstrated the relationship between musical rhythm and speech prosody, this has been rarely addressed in the context of second language (L2) acquisition. Here, we investigated whether musical rhythmic skills and the production of L2 speech prosody are predictive of one another. We tested both musical and linguistic rhythmic competences of 23 native French speakers of L2 English.