The melody of a song, in some situations, can facilitate learning and recall. The experiments in this article demonstrate that text is better recalled when it is heard as a song rather than as speech, provided the music repeats so that it is easily learned. When Ss heard 3 verses of a text sung with the same melody, they had better recall than when the same text was spoken. However, the opposite occurred when Ss heard a single verse of a text sung or when Ss heard different melodies for each verse of a song; in these instances, Ss had better recall when the text was spoken. Furthermore, the experiments indicate that the melody contributes more than just rhythmical information. Music is a rich structure that chunks words and phrases, identifies line lengths, identifies stress patterns, and adds emphasis as well as focuses listeners on surface characteristics. The musical structure can assist in learning, in retrieving, and if necessary, in reconstructing a text.

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If and only if each single cue uniquely defines its target, a independence model based on fragment theory can predict the strength of a combined dual cue from the strengths of its single cue components. If the single cues do not each uniquely define their target, no single monotonic function can predict the strength of the dual cue from its components; rather, what matters is the number of possible targets. The probability of generating a target word was .19 for rhyme cues, .14 for category cues, and .97 for rhyme-plus-category dual cues. Moreover, some pairs of cues had probabilities of producing their targets of .03 when used individually and 1.00 when used together, whereas other pairs had moderate probabilities individually and together. The results, which are interpreted in terms of multiple constraints limiting the number of responses, show why rhymes, which play a minimal role in laboratory studies of memory, are common in real-world mnemonics.

To study the beginning stages of expertise, 14 students. who were inexperienced with ballads, heard and recalled a series of 5 ballads over the course of 5 weeks. Compared with their first recall of the first ballad, their first recall of the fifth ballad had one and a half times as many words, two times as many rhyming words, and three times as much line structure evident in the written recall protocols. Compared with novices, the 14 beginning experts more often filled in blank spaces in novel ballads with words of the correct number of syllables and more often chose the original stanza of a novel ballad that was paired with a changed version of the stanza. The beginning experts were also able to compose, in 20 min, ballads about two thirds as long as the 10-stanza ballads they learned. Thirty characteristics were identified in the set of the five learned ballads. The ballads composed by the beginning experts used over half of these. The beginning experts also explicitly stated about one quarter of these 30 characteristics, but there was no statistical relationship between the characteristics used and the characteristics stated. Memory expertise is viewed as a pervasive aspect of cognition in which people make use of a variety of regularities in the material to be learned.In 1949, Harlow, reviewing this work on repeated choice tasks with monkeys a n d children, noted thatThe variety of learning situations that play an important role in determining our basic personality characteristics and in changing some of us into thinking animals are repeated many times in similar form. The behavior of the human being is not to be understood in terms of the results of single learning situations but rather in terms of changes which are affected through multiple, though comparable, learning problems.. . .This learning to learn transforms the organism from a creature that adapts to a changing environment by trial and error to one that adapts by seeming hypothesis and insight. (p.51)A l l reported effects are significant at the .05 level unless otherwise noted.We wish to thank John Bransford, Arnold Glass, Keith Holyoak and Ian Hunter for their comments, the two professional singers, Margaret and Wayne Martin, and above all, the students for their help. Support was provided by NSF grants number BNS-8410124 and number BNS-9010174.Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to David C. Rubin. Department of Experimental Psychology, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0086. RUBIN, WALLACE, AND HOUSTONResearch on human memory has concentrated on "the results of single learning situations," but not exclusively. The problem of memory expertise has had a small but long and continuous history in mainstream memory research. Ericsson (1985) (Holding, 1985;Intons-Peterson & Smyth, 1987;Noice, 1991Noice, , 1992Thompson et al., 1991). Similarly, Neisser (1982) reprinted several articles on memory experts. In the last two decades the detailed investigation into possible mechanisms that allow expertise has expanded, including studies...

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