Why can you still sing along to a chorus from ten years ago, but not remember last week’s vocabulary? One possible explanation has to do with rhythm, melody and repetition. How well that explanation holds up is what we will look at here. With studies, and with what they don’t show.
Babies hear the beat first
Let’s start right at the beginning, with newborns. In 1998, researchers in Paris played sentences in foreign languages to French babies who were only a few days old. The trick: the recordings were filtered. The individual sounds were blurred, and what was left was mostly melody and rhythm. It sounded a bit like someone talking behind a thick wall.
Even so, the babies noticed when the language changed, for example from English to Japanese. More interesting still, they told English and Dutch on one side apart from Spanish and Italian on the other. English and Dutch, however, they could not tell apart from each other. The researchers explain this with rhythm families. Spanish and Italian belong to the languages in which each syllable gets roughly the same amount of time. In English and Dutch, individual stressed syllables carry the beat.
What does that mean for us? At first, only this: rhythm is among the first things the human ear picks up about a language, before it understands any words. That does not automatically mean adults learn faster through rhythm. But it is a good hint as to why it is worth paying attention to the beat of a language.
Singing instead of just speaking
Now to adults. In 2014, a team in Edinburgh had sixty adults learn short phrases in Hungarian, a language almost none of them knew. One group repeated the phrases. One spoke them rhythmically, in time. One sang them. After fifteen minutes of learning, the singing group did best in the tests overall. Differences in age, mood or musical experience did not explain the result.
One detail I find especially interesting: speaking rhythmically helped less than singing. The beat alone does not seem to be enough. One possible explanation is that melody lays down an extra trace for memory to hold on to. Whether that is right is still open.
The limits of this study matter too. It was a single study, with adults, short phrases and tests shortly after learning. It shows that singing can help with remembering phrases word for word. It does not show that singing teaches you to speak a language. Laura mentioned it briefly in her article on the Time-Travel Map. This is the closer look.
Why some tunes stick
Everyone knows it: the earworm. A piece of music that repeats in your head without being asked. In 2017, a research group in London took a closer look. Around 3,000 people named their most frequent earworms. The researchers then compared those songs with similarly popular songs that hardly anyone named as an earworm.
The result: earworms tended to be faster. Their melody often followed a familiar shape, for example rising and then falling. At the same time, they had something unusual, such as surprising leaps or repeated notes. Familiar and a little bit different: that mix seems to stick.
For language learning this is a lovely idea, but not yet proof. The study looked at earworms, not vocabulary. Whether a learning song stays in your head better because it behaves like an earworm, we don’t know for sure. It is plausible, though: a sentence that repeats itself gets repeated more often. And repetition is one of the best-supported ways of remembering things.
Odd but true: the earworm chart
Which songs did the roughly 3,000 people in the London study name most often as earworms? Right at the top was ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga. Others included ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ by Kylie Minogue, ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ by Journey, ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ by Gotye and ‘Moves Like Jagger’ by Maroon 5.
That a song called ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ made the list has a certain logic. And if one of them is now playing in your head: sorry. That was the proof.
What music cannot do
There are plenty of big promises about music and learning. Some sound scientific but aren’t. So, honestly:
- Music does not replace practice. If you only listen, you learn melody and sound, but hardly how to build sentences yourself. Singing along and speaking yourself are the important part.
- Not everyone benefits in the same way. Some people find music distracting or unpleasant while learning. That is not a flaw; it is a sign to adapt the method, for example quieter, without vocals, or with just a simple beat.
- There is still little research on neurodivergent learners specifically learning foreign languages with music. Many find clear structure and repetition helpful. That is experience, not a promise of healing, and it does not replace professional support.
- Singing brings you closer to sound and sentence structure, but not automatically to conversation. When to say what in everyday life is something you learn more through talking with people.
I will write about the best-known music myths in more detail in a separate article.
How LingoRhythm uses this
At LingoRhythm, every tense gets a short song with the same sentence every time: comer una manzana. The idea behind it is modest. The song is not supposed to work magic. It is supposed to give the sentence a shape that is easy to repeat. And it should make the ending audible, because that is what matters: como, comí, comeré. Add a fixed review plan after 1, 3 and 7 days, because spaced repetition is well supported.
What you can try today
You can test the idea in a small self-experiment. No lab needed.
- Take two sentences: Como una manzana and Comí una manzana.
- Say the first one five times, quite normally.
- Sing the second one five times, to a tune you know.
- Write down which one was which.
- Check after three days: which sentence comes to mind faster and more accurately?
A single try proves nothing. But it shows you how your own mind responds to melody. And for your learning, that matters more than any average.
If you would like to try sentence, song and picture together: ¡A comer! starts with Lesson 01, the Right-Now Camera.
In short: we notice rhythm very early, and singing can help you keep foreign phrases word for word. Music is not a miracle cure, but it is a good carrier for repetition. Whether it works for you is something you can best find out yourself.
Sources and image credit
- Nazzi, T., Bertoncini, J. & Mehler, J. (1998): Language discrimination by newborns: Toward an understanding of the role of rhythm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24(3), 756–766. doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.24.3.756
- Ludke, K. M., Ferreira, F. & Overy, K. (2014): Singing can facilitate foreign language learning. Memory & Cognition, 42(1), 41–52. doi.org/10.3758/s13421-013-0342-5
- Jakubowski, K. et al. (2017): Dissecting an earworm: Melodic features and song popularity predict involuntary musical imagery. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(2), 122–135. doi.org/10.1037/aca0000090
- American Psychological Association (2016): press release on the earworm study. apa.org
- Cepeda, N. J. et al. (2006): Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
- Cover image: Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash.