Optimizing song retention through the spacing effect

The spacing effect refers to the improvement in memory retention for materials learned in a series of sessions, as opposed to massing learning in a single session. It has been extensively studied in the domain of verbal learning using word lists. Less evidence is available for connected discourse or tasks requiring the complex coordination of verbal and other domains. In particular, the effect of spacing on the retention of words and music in song has yet to be determined. In this study, university students were taught an unaccompanied two-verse song based on traditional materials to a criterion of 95% correct memory for sung words. Subsequent training sessions were either massed or spaced by two days or one week and tested at a retention interval of three weeks. Performances were evaluated for number of correct and incorrect syllables, number of correctly and incorrectly pitched notes, degree notes were off-pitch, and number of hesitations while singing. The data revealed strong evidence for a spacing effect for song between the massed and spaced conditions at a retention interval of three weeks, and evidence of no difference between the two spaced conditions. These findings suggest that the ongoing cues offered by surface features in the song are strong enough to enable verbatim recall across spaced conditions, as long as the spacing interval reaches a critical threshold.

Discourse Prosody in Children's Rhyme Speech Produced by Prelingually Deaf Mandarin-Speaking Children With Cochlear Implants

Purpose This study aimed to obtain a comprehensive understanding about how Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) performed speech prosody in a connected discourse and to what extent their prosodic scenario differed from those normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method Fifteen prelingually deaf Mandarin-speaking children with unilateral multichannel CIs were chosen and 15 age-matched NH controls were recruited. Speech samples were spontaneously elicited by children's rhyme speech genre and subject to phonetic annotation. Acoustic analysis was conducted on all speech samples, mainly focusing on the measurements of duration and fundamental frequency (F0). Tempo measures included temporal fluency, syllable-lengthening, and rhythm metrics, whereas melodic measures included both local and global F0 variations under different prosodic domains. Results The CI children generally achieved compatible temporal performance with the NH children in spontaneous discourse, except that they were somewhat arbitrary when operationalizing lengthening strategy and pausing strategy at different prosodic boundaries. With regard to melodic performance, CI children may not sufficiently modulate local phonetic nuances of F0 variation, and meanwhile, they performed atypically in the global F0 declination pattern and overall F0 resetting pattern, failing to signal the specific structure of children's rhyme discourse. Early age at implantation and longer CI experience did not play a significant role in the temporal performance of the CI children but did facilitate their articulation of dynamic pitch variation in the spontaneous discourse to some extent. Conclusion CI children did exhibit atypical prosodic patterns in discourse context, especially the overall mapping between the prosodic manifestation and the discourse structure.

A Functional Analysis of Passive Clauses in Selected Independence Speeches of Nigerian Heads of Government

Scholarly works on political discourse have been from different perspectives but there is a dearth of work on the functional analysis of passive clauses in political speeches. Even though fragments of the general functions of the passive clause can be gleaned in some grammar books, its deployment in connected discourse has not been adequately explored. This is a gap which the current paper fills. The paper which adopts Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), examined six purposively selected Independence Anniversary speeches of Nigerian Heads of Government from 1967 to 2016, sourced from the internet and the national dailies like “The Punch”, “The Guardian” and “The Tribune”. The paper has revealed that there are different kinds of passive clause but the short be passive is most the commonly used. Passive clauses perform six main functions in connected discourse and they are used for the purpose of foregrounding information or achieving information focus.

The influence of discourse context on children’s ordering of “new” and “old” information

Adult speakers typically order referents that have been previously mentioned in the discourse (“old” referents) before newly introduced referents (“new” referents). But 3–5-year-olds acquiring German exhibit a “new-old” preference in a task involving question-answer sequences (Narasimhan, Bhuvana and Christine Dimroth. 2008. Word order and information status in child language. Cognition 107. 317–329). Here we ask whether we can change 4–5-year-olds’ new-old preference by manipulating the context in order to encourage connected discourse. Findings show that discourse context changes children’s new-old preference. Children produce the new-old order in fluent utterances and the old-new order in non-fluent utterances. Adult controls overwhelmingly prefer the old-new order, even more so when the weight (number of syllables) of the old referent label is greater than that of the new referent label. Our study demonstrates that although cognitive and communicative biases may influence children’s ordering patterns in non-adult-like ways, such patterns are not categorical, but are flexibly influenced by factors such as discourse context.