Speaker
Description
Speech and song are human vocal behaviors with partially different acoustic characteristics and underlying cognitive processes. Throughout evolution song has emerged as an oral tool for long-term information storage and transfer. However, it remains unclear which features of song facilitate this function.
We present preliminary results from an ongoing study that investigates how the rhythmic and melodic structure of song influences the memory for continuous narratives. Thirty-one healthy participants listened to spoken and sung stories, and their memory was assessed using a free-recall paradigm with both immediate and delayed recall. We show how listening to speech vs. song affects the overall memorability, as well as the level of detail, and discuss how song may moderate the representation of the event structure of narratives. Additionally, we investigate how inter-individual differences in auditory-motor synchronization and musicality affect long-term memory.