Characteristics and constraints in ballads and their effects on memory

Wallace, Wanda T.; Rubin, David C.

doi:10.1080/01638539109544781

Cited by 24 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Twenty min were allowed for this task. Similar tasks have proved successful with traditional ballad singers (Wallace, 1991; Wallace & Rubin, 1988a) and with tests of undergraduates' knowledge of other domains (Rubin & Kontis, 1983;Rubin et al, 1991). This task is a way of assessing subjects' knowledge that excludes rote recall.…”

Section: Composition Of a New Balladmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, ballads are a highly structured stimulus domain with many different characteristics that play individual and interacting roles in making ballads easy for those who are experts in the genre to learn and remember (Wallace & Rubin, 1991). The characteristics are valuable for encoding, retrieval, and informed guessing, The characteristics chunk and link words to lines and stanzas as well as linking stanzas to ballads as a whole.…”

Section: Beginning Expertisementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ballads followed by their number in the Brown, and in the Child (1882-1898) collections when applicable, are: Lord Thomas and Fair Annet (Brown 19M,Child 73), The Girl I Left Behind (Brown 145B), Earl Brand, now more commonly known as Sweet William and Fair Annet (Brown 3B, Child 7), The Lexington Murder (Brown 65A), and James Harris, now more commonly known as The House Carpenter (Brown 40A, Child 243). The ballads were chosen from the popular ballad set of Wallace and Rubin (1991) because they all had a similar story line. To provide ballads of approximately equal length, the 10 stanzas that best told the story were selected from each ballad.…”

Section: Learning Sessionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Measures were made of the subjects' use of the most prominent aspects of ballad organization: rhyme and line structure. Rhyme, especially end rhyme, is the most noticeable of the soundpattern repetitions used in English (e.g., Hyman & Rubin, 1990;Wallace & Rubin, 1991). Line structure provides the basis for the regular iambic rhythm of the ballads.…”

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The Beginnings of Expertise for Ballads

1993

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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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Section: Composition Of a New Balladmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Beginning Expertisementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Learning Sessionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Beginnings of Expertise for Ballads

1993

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“…Rhythm and meter provide a recurrent temporal framework within which verbal memory can be facilitated. In ballads, for example, linguistic and musical stress tend to coincide (Wallace & Rubin, 1991). In vocal music, as in story telling in the oral tradition, formal musical structure is used in part as a vehicle to elicit linguistic meaning by synchronizing speech with music and leveraging the memory advantages of music.…”

Section: Innate Versus Learned Mappings and Representationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Varieties of musical experience

2006

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Implications of external memory for investigations of mind

Hertel

1993

Applied Cognitive Psychology

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External memory–records of experiences that are maintained in repositories that are external to their users–provides context for many everyday cognitive acts. Some initial research has shown that such context influences learning, remembering, and judgements of knowing. The scope of both basic and applied memory research should be broadened in ways that address issues about the interaction of external memory and mind.

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Characteristics and constraints in ballads and their effects on memory

Cited by 24 publications

References 8 publications

The Beginnings of Expertise for Ballads

The Beginnings of Expertise for Ballads

Varieties of musical experience

Implications of external memory for investigations of mind

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