Repeating aloud makes you remember better
Reading aloud will help you remember things, a study says. The effect is even better when you address it to someone else.
Professor Victor Boucher of the University of Montreal’s Department of Linguistics and Translation leads the study whose findings will be published in Consciousness and Cognition.
To demonstrate this, Boucher and Alexis Lafleur asked 44 French-speaking university students to read a series of words on a screen. During the task, the participants wore headphones that emitted “white noise” to mask their own voices and eliminate auditory feedback.
The subjects were submitted to four experimental conditions: repeating in their head, repeating silently while moving their lips, repeating aloud while looking at the screen, and finally, repeating aloud while addressing someone. After a distraction task, they were asked to identify the words they recalled having said from a list that included words not used in the test.
The results show a clear difference when the exercise was performed aloud in the presence of someone else, even though the participants had heard absolutely nothing. Repeating in one’s head without gesturing was the least effective way to recall information.
“The simple fact of articulating without making a sound creates a sensorimotor link that increases our ability to remember, but if it is related to the functionality of speech, we remember even more,” Boucher said.
