A few years ago, French researcher Daniel Schön showed that language learners find it easier to learn new foreign words when someone sings them than when they are included in normal speech. And it is not only due to the motivation attributed to the music. The researchers say that listening to songs involves the same area of the brain that we use to learn languages . In addition, when we hear a tune, it is easier for us to remember the letter that accompanies it than if we try to memorize those same words without rhythm or cadence, as they explained in Cognition magazine.
To demonstrate this, Schön and his colleagues conducted an experiment using a list of six "nonsense" words constructed from 11 syllables: Gimysy, Mimosi, Pogysi, Pymiso, Sipygy, and Sysipi. And they used a synthesizer to pronounce them several times, creating a 7-minute sound file with these six words. When 26 French-speaking subjects were asked to listen to the recording and then identify the words from a list, the scientists found that the level of accuracy was similar to what they would have had in guessing them. I mean, they hadn't learned anything. However, in a second test in which the same words were chanted with a certain intonation, another group of 26 participants in identical conditions managed to learn them with a 64% correctness in later tests.
