Study finds 4-year-olds are considerably better than adults at remembering rhyming verse

By Christian Jarrett Many parents will attest to their young children’s remarkable knack for remembering rhymes, often claiming that their children’s abilities exceed their own. Can this really be true? In nearly all other contexts, adult memory is known to be superior to that of children, for obvious reasons, including the immaturity of children’s brain development and their lack of sophisticated mnemonic strategies. A small study in Developmental Science has put pre-literate four-year-olds’ memory abilities to the test, finding that they outperformed their parents, and a comparison group of young adults, in their ability to recall a previously unfamiliar short rhyme: “The Radish-nosed King”. “We argue that children are better than adults at recalling verse because they exercise the skill more in order to participate in the transmission of their culture through songs and stories, poems and taunts,” the researchers said. Psychologists have, before now, largely neglected to study children’s verbatim memory for rhymes. They’ve been more interested in whether rhyming verse can act as a memory booster for content – that is, the meaning and story conveyed by the words – rather than the words themselves.  These studies have found that rhyme tends to be a hindrance compared with straightforward prose. This might be because kids love rhymes and so focus more on the rhyming words and sounds, at the expense of t...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Educational Memory Source Type: blogs