Preschoolers have better long-term memory for rhyming text than adults

The Sweet Spot: When Children’s Developing Abilities, Brains, and Knowledge Make Them Better Learners Than Adults

Cognitive development is marked by age-related improvements across a number of domains, as young children perform worse than their older counterparts on most tasks. However, there are cases in which young children, and even infants, outperform older children and adults. So when, and why, does being young sometimes confer an advantage? This article provides a comprehensive examination of the peculiar cases in which younger children perform better. First, we outline the specific instances in which younger is better across domains, including mastering language, using probabilistic information, detecting causal relations, remembering certain information, and even solving problems. We then examine how children’s reduced cognitive abilities, ongoing brain development, more limited prior knowledge, and heightened tendency to explore benefits their learning, reasoning, perception, and memory from a mechanistic perspective. We hold that considering all of these factors together is essential for understanding the ways in which children’s learning is unique and that science has much to learn from a careful consideration of childhood.

Recitation as a structured intervention to enhance the long-term verbatim retention and gist recall of complex texts in kindergarteners

Recitation is an effective way for children to become familiar with basic blocks of knowledge. It is not clear, however, whether repeated structured exposure to complex texts via listening or active reciting benefits the ability of kindergarteners to retain verbal material in long-term memory verbatim and as content. Here, we tested the effectiveness of teaching longer texts to kindergarteners by repeated exposure in terms of long-term retention (6 months). A set of 28 rhyming sentences (224 words) were introduced, 3 in each session, and the increasingly longer text was practiced by either voiced recitation or listening. The rhymes were in a literary language, and word meaning in each new rhyme was elaborated when first introduced. Both groups (recitation and listening) showed good long-term retention, but the recitation group outperformed the listening group when assessed at 24 h, 1 month, and 6 months postintervention in terms of the recall rate, error rate, number of prompts required, and sequence fidelity. In the later assessments, the reciting group was the more fluent group in producing the rhymes. Moreover, at 6 months postintervention, the gist (content) of the rhymes and the meaning of vocabulary items from the texts were robustly retained, with an advantage for the recitation group. Thus, practice in affording multiple repetitions, specifically active recitation, resulted in fluent, effortless, and accurate recall of statements and their content. We propose that these results support the notion that repetition-based practice may promote the mastery of complex verbal material by enabling better engagement of procedural memory, that is, by promoting "proceduralization" processes.

Phonemes: Lexical access and beyond

Phonemes play a central role in traditional theories as units of speech perception and access codes to lexical representations. Phonemes have two essential properties: they are 'segment-sized' (the size of a consonant or vowel) and abstract (a single phoneme may be have different acoustic realisations). Nevertheless, there is a long history of challenging the phoneme hypothesis, with some theorists arguing for differently sized phonological units (e.g. features or syllables) and others rejecting abstract codes in favour of representations that encode detailed acoustic properties of the stimulus. The phoneme hypothesis is the minority view today. We defend the phoneme hypothesis in two complementary ways. First, we show that rejection of phonemes is based on a flawed interpretation of empirical findings. For example, it is commonly argued that the failure to find acoustic invariances for phonemes rules out phonemes. However, the lack of invariance is only a problem on the assumption that speech perception is a bottom-up process. If learned sublexical codes are modified by top-down constraints (which they are), then this argument loses all force. Second, we provide strong positive evidence for phonemes on the basis of linguistic data. Almost all findings that are taken (incorrectly) as evidence against phonemes are based on psycholinguistic studies of single words. However, phonemes were first introduced in linguistics, and the best evidence for phonemes comes from linguistic analyses of complex word forms and sentences. In short, the rejection of phonemes is based on a false analysis and a too-narrow consideration of the relevant data.

Exaggeration of Language-Specific Rhythms in English and French Children's Songs

The available evidence indicates that the music of a culture reflects the speech rhythm of the prevailing language. The normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) is a measure of durational contrast between successive events that can be applied to vowels in speech and to notes in music. Music-language parallels may have implications for the acquisition of language and music, but it is unclear whether native-language rhythms are reflected in children's songs. In general, children's songs exhibit greater rhythmic regularity than adults' songs, in line with their caregiving goals and frequent coordination with rhythmic movement. Accordingly, one might expect lower nPVI values (i.e., lower variability) for such songs regardless of culture. In addition to their caregiving goals, children's songs may serve an intuitive didactic function by modeling culturally relevant content and structure for music and language. One might therefore expect pronounced rhythmic parallels between children's songs and language of origin. To evaluate these predictions, we analyzed a corpus of 269 English and French songs from folk and children's music anthologies. As in prior work, nPVI values were significantly higher for English than for French children's songs. For folk songs (i.e., songs not for children), the difference in nPVI for English and French songs was small and in the expected direction but non-significant. We subsequently collected ratings from American and French monolingual and bilingual adults, who rated their familiarity with each song, how much they liked it, and whether or not they thought it was a children's song. Listeners gave higher familiarity and liking ratings to songs from their own culture, and they gave higher familiarity and preference ratings to children's songs than to other songs. Although higher child-directedness ratings were given to children's than to folk songs, French listeners drove this effect, and their ratings were uniquely predicted by nPVI. Together, these findings suggest that language-based rhythmic structures are evident in children's songs, and that listeners expect exaggerated language-based rhythms in children's songs. The implications of these findings for enculturation processes and for the acquisition of music and language are discussed.