Rhyming verses may make you think of Shakespearean sonnets or old-fashioned love poems. Yet, rhymes are ubiquitous in modern life. We remember how to spell words by repeating “i before e, except after c,” and the number of days in the months through “Thirty days hath September …,” Attorneys admonish jurors that “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” and parents admonish children that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Are these rhymes simply fun or do they also serve a larger purpose?
In a recent article published in the Psychonomic Society journal Memory & Cognition, Brooke Lea, Andrew Elfenbein, and David Rapp (pictured below) examine how rhymes affect language processing and memory. Prior research by the same authors found that alliteration reactivated previously read sections of a poem.
Participants were asked to judge as quickly as possible whether a word (e.g., barn) appeared earlier in the poem. Some participants read a poem with the line “all along the way-winding road, wary whispers of the old barn” while others saw “all along the raw and rutted road the reddish barn.” The key question was how quickly participants would remember reading the word “barn” when they are asked just after the line “the wooden willowy warp of wildcarrot.” If the alliteration serves as an implicit memory cue, then participants who read the barn line with the “w” alliteration should recognize the word “barn” faster than participants who saw the word among the “r” alliteration. And that’s just what they found – alliteration served as an implicit memory cue and increased recognition speed.
In the current Memory & Cognition article, the researchers examined if rhyme has similar effects on memory. Participants read poems with an AABB rhyme pattern and were given recognition memory probes either just before or just after a key word. For some of the poems, the key word rhymed with the line containing the probe and for others it did not.
Overall, across two experiments, undergraduate student participants were faster to correctly recognize the probe word (SAD) in the rhyming condition. However, this memory benefit only happened when probed after the rhyming keyword. When undergraduates were probed just before the rhyme, there was no difference between the rhyme and no rhyme conditions. The participants did not anticipate the rhymes before they happened. See the left half of the figure below.
However, experts in poetry may more easily pick up on the rhyme scheme and start anticipating upcoming rhymes. If so, they should show memory benefits for rhyming lines when probed both before and after the rhyming words. In Experiment 2, the researchers recruited a group of expert participants consisting of 33 poets, rap artists, English professors, and advanced grad students. Unlike the novice undergraduates, these experts did show anticipation of the rhyme – they were faster to recognize the probe word both before and after the rhyming keyword. See the right half of the figure below.
The results suggest that rhymes are an important memory cue. Reading a rhyme automatically reactivated earlier sections of a poem and, for experts, that reactivation occurred even in anticipation of an upcoming rhyme.
In the words of the authors,
We found that experienced rhymers (poets, rap artists, graduate students and faculty in English) ‘heard’ rhymes before they saw them. Without intending to, they used the rhyme scheme of poems to anticipate upcoming lines prior to reading them. Our less experienced rhymers (undergraduate psychology students), by contrast, showed no such anticipations.
So all those rhymes we use in our daily life are more than just fun – they’re also important memory cues. And the next time you’re out hiking remember “Leaflets three, let it be” and avoid some itchy nights.
Featured Psychonomic Society article
Lea, R.B., Elfenbein, A. & Rapp, D.N. (2021). Rhyme as resonance in poetry comprehension: An expert–novice study. Memory & Cognition, 49, 1285–1299. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01167-0