Predictors of phoneme and stress perception in undergraduate students of singing

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the relationship between undergraduate vocal music majors' diction acquisition abilities for singing in a nonnative language (as rated both by themselves and by their studio voice teachers) and their scores on an objective test of phonemic and stress perception. Ten students with varying levels of university voice training served as participants. The results showed significant negative correlations between each of the teachers' four ratings and the students' scores on the phonemic awareness subtest. In addition, 20% of the students demonstrated evidence of underdeveloped phonemic awareness skills, as indicated by their below average test performance. Considerable individual differences were also observed in the students' abilities to track phonemes within a sequence of phonemes, count and track syllables within a sequence of syllables, and track combinations of phoneme and syllable changes in sequence, as evidenced by subtest performance scores. These findings corroborate existing reports which indicate that approximately 30% of the population does not fully develop phonemic awareness skills in the absence of special training. The findings support the utility of this objective test of phonemic and stress perception as a means of identifying students who will have difficulty with diction acquisition, and point to possibilities for pretraining to improve their response to diction instruction.