Repeating aloud boosts verbal memory

Toronto: Repeating aloud boosts verbal memory, especially when you do it while addressing another person, a new study has found.

"We knew that repeating aloud was good for memory, but this is the first study to show that if it is done in a context of communication, the effect is greater in terms of information recall," said Professor Victor Boucher of the University of Montreal.

44 French-speaking university students read a series of lexemes on a screen. A lexeme is a word such as it is found in a dictionary.

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 lexemes they recalled having said from a list that included lexemes 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.