Why are rhymes easy to learn?

The question was why a list of rhyming paired associates is learned faster than a list of unrelated pairs. It is proposed that the rhyming relation restricts the range of response alternatives to the stimulus, practically converting recall into a recognition test. Several tests of this hypothesis proved confirmatory. First, an assonance (change of last phoneme) rule for pairs, which restricts alternatives about as much as a rhyming rule, facilitated performance as much as did a rhyming rule. Second, when response alternatives were equated by multiple-choi ce tests for memory, the advantage for rhyming pairs vanished. A third experiment showed that the presence of some rhyming pairs in a list induced S to generalize this rule inappropriately to other pairs, thereby suffering interference on those pairs composed by re-pairing rhyming units. It is a well-known fact of everyday life, and even of the laboratory, that rhyming is an aid to memory. Poetry, at least rhyming verse, is more easily learned than prose (McGeoch & Irion, 1952). The popular mnemonic systems (e.g., Furst, 1948) propound and exploit the power of rhymes, and most of us have learned the alphabet, the number of days in the months, and the order and names of cranial nerves, etc., by one or another rhyming mnemonic. These mnemonics, or the poetry, songs, and limericks which they resemble, display two organizing features for the memorizer: rhythmic pattern, or meter, and rhyming of the end word in successive repetitions of the rhythmic pattern. The mnemonic function of rhythmic pattern may stem from its counting and placekeeping features, i.e., it tells 5 the number and order of stressed syllabic units in each constituent (line). But putting aside any analysis of rhythmic pattern, we shall here focus on the rhyming feature of poetry. Paring matters down to the merest bones, rhyming is a relationship between two words or phonological compounds. Specifically, a 1 This research was supported by Research Grant MH-139SO, awarded to the first author from the National Institute of Mental Health. Thanks are due to Peter Arnold, who helped with the last experiment, and to Gary Olson, who contributed some original ideas.