Recent interdisciplinary research increasingly confirms the cognitive, emotional, and neurophysiological benefits of music in education. While popular songs are often introduced into language classrooms to promote motivation and enjoyment, their pedagogical value remains limited because they are rarely aligned with specific linguistic goals. Building on recent developments in music therapy, cognitive neuroscience, and applied linguistics, the present study investigates the effects of Purpose-Designed Musical Interventions, original compositions created by the researcher to mirror the prosodic, syntactic, and phonological features of Spanish, on adult learners’ acquisition of Spanish as a foreign language. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on commercial music, this intervention employs musical structures that are intentionally synchronised with linguistic form and meaning. Rhythm corresponds to the natural stress patterns and syllabic timing of Spanish; melody provides an emotional anchor for key lexical and grammatical constructions; and harmonic progression, especially tonic, subdominant, and dominant functions, is structured to reflect syntactic organisation. In this way, the intervention activates neural mechanisms related to auditory-motor integration and predictive processing, facilitating the encoding of phonological patterns, grammatical sequences, and vocabulary in an emotionally coherent and cognitively efficient manner. The study adopts an Explanatory Sequential Mixed-Methods design to evaluate both the measurable and experiential effects of these interventions. The quantitative phase assesses changes in vocabulary retention, pronunciation accuracy, and grammatical understanding through pre- and post-test evaluation, while the qualitative phase explores learner motivation, engagement, and emotional response through reflective questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Participants are adult beginners of Spanish with no prior exposure to the language, divided into experimental and control groups and instructed through PDMI-based and textbook-based lessons of comparable duration and content. By integrating therapeutic insight with pedagogical design, this research proposes a replicable, evidence-based framework for music-mediated language instruction. The anticipated findings are expected to inform curriculum development, inspire innovative methodologies, and contribute to theoretical discussions in neurolinguistics, cognitive education, and applied music therapy, advancing a paradigm in which music functions as a central modality in cognitively and affectively integrated foreign language learning.
Keywords: music therapy; foreign language acquisition; adult learners; structured auditory input; cognitive neuroscience.
All rights reserved
/
Search inscriptions
