In recent years there has been considerable public interest in the extra-musical effects of music education, but this has been accompanied by sustained scholarly investigation only to some extent. Research findings have tentatively suggested, however, that a relationship exists between musical learning and language development. This empirical study attempts to explore that relationship by asking whether music, employed as a teaching tool in the modern foreign languages (MFL) classroom, can help to accelerate pupils' language learning. 56 pupils at a large secondary school in the UK were the subjects of the study: these were divided between experimental and control groups. An intervention based on a song was found to be significantly more effective than conventional methods in the short term in helping subjects to memorise vocabulary items. The implications for this finding are discussed, in the context of the current debate about extrinsic justification of the arts. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)