In this research, we try to analyse how a popular lullaby could be helpful for 7 years-old French pupils while reading German texts. Could musical entertainment enhance the abilities to pronounce more successfully the vowels of German and also to avoid many of current difficulties described by many authors and observed at school?The experimentation we describe here was achieved in a bilingual class in Strasbourg. Twenty learners were divided into 2 groups. The 1st group had to learn the song about the story of “The Sleeping Beauty”, whereas the other group had to understand and read the same text, but without singing it. The subjects were recorded while reading the text of the song before the experimentation (test T1) and a few days after the end of the experimentation (test T2). We also examined the role of multimedia material developed in 2008 and containing a karaoke version of the song and exercises meant to facilitate learning to read. The specificity of T1 and T2 in each group (musical features, accentuation, formant frequencies) and the comparison of two similar sequences containing /a/ on the one hand and /a:/ on the other hand, lead us to the conclusion that, as predicted from theories in psycholinguistics, neurosciences, sociolinguistics, pedagogy and previous experiences, music definitely has an effect upon the quality of vowel pronunciation of a specific stress-timed language like German (L2).
