Researchers in France have discovered that people tend to find foreign words easier to remember if those words are sung rather than spoken according to an article I found yesterday.
The researchers repeatedly played a recording of number of made-up words made using a speech synthesiser to a group people. Then they played the words again along with other words and asked the people say which of the words were on the first recording. When the first recording was made using ordinary speech, the participants did very poorly. However after listening to a recording of the words being sung, the participants could recall two thirds of them.
The conclusion was that you tend to engage emotionally with words when they’re sung, and that the singing can help you to identify which syllabic sounds tend to come together. The researchers commented that “Learning a foreign language, especially in the first learning phase wherein one needs to segment new words, may largely benefit from the motivational and structuring properties of music in song.”
