Effect of Melody on Text Recall

by Eda Aydin, Ozlem Salehi, Dilara Semerci, Ozge N. Yalcin

Abstract

Melody of a music have a facilitative effect on memory. The aim of this study is to investigate the cause of this phenomenon by using three experiment settings. The Ss heard 19 words sung with a well-known melody, with an unknown melody and without any melody but in the form of chunks. The results show that recall is better when the same text is listened without any melody both in serial and free recall. Both of the serial and free recall are also better when the same text is listened with a known melody than when listened with an unknown melody. However, the statistical analysis shows that there is no significant difference between the known and unknown melody. These results show that melody of a music can have a distracting effect on recall and the constructive effect of music on recall is mainly due to its ability in chunking the words with its rhythmic structure.

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