Word recall is affected by surrounding metrical context

ABSTRACT

It has been claimed that English has a metrical structure, or rhythm, in which stressed and unstressed syllables alternate. In previous research regular, alternating patterns have been shown to facilitate online language comprehension. Expanding these findings to downstream processing would lead to the prediction that metrical regularity enhances memory. Research from the memory literature, however, indicates that regular patterns are less salient and therefore less well remembered, and strings of similar sounds are harder to remember. This work suggests that, like lists of words with similar sounds, lists of words with similar metrical patterns would be less accurately remembered than comparable metrically irregular patterns. This study investigates these conflicting predictions by examining metrical regularity in a recall task. We find that words are better recalled when they do not match their metrical context, suggesting a regular metrical structure may not be beneficial in all contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Word recall
• prosody
• metrical regularity
• stressed syllables
• recall

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Daniel Escobar, Sara Geoghegan, and Minqi Wang for data coding and running subjects. Portions of this research were presented at Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody 3, Urbana, IL, May 2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Amelia E. Kimball http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6208-0104

Notes

1 For details on the random effects and the model selection process, see model code available at the following url: https://osf.io/svx5m/?view_only=53168e7af030483a82cb47fb0cf1ba74.

2 Notches are (1.58 * the interquartile range)/(sqrt(n)). This gives a roughly 95% confidence interval for comparing medians. If the notches of two boxes do not overlap, this suggests that the medians are significantly different.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by James S. McDonnell Foundation; National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders: [Grant Number R01DC008774].