Speech and song are fundamental forms of human vocal behavior. Despite their commonalities, song also shows characteristics of music such as its rhythmic and melodic structure. Interestingly, a memory advantage for recalling verbal content has been suggested for song compared to speech. The mechanisms underlying this effect and its neural underpinnings, however, are still unknown.

We hypothesize that the rhythmic temporal structure and melodic pitch information in song vs. speech leads to predictive processes recruiting differential neural circuitry, which aid the memorization of song. Therefore, we expect a higher episodic memory performance in the song condition, which is predicted by the rhythmic and melodic structure of song. We hypothesize that additionally both the musical event structure and emotions elicited by the song will have an effect on episodic memory.

To test these hypotheses the young adult, healthy, native German speaking participants will listen to both spoken and sung versions of crime stories and afterwards freely retell what they remember from the stories (immediate recall). Long-term recall will be tested the following day. The stimulus material consists of two short stories by Edgar Wallace that will be recorded spoken and sung by the same speaker. The sung melody is being specifically composed to fit the text. Participants will be assessed for musicality and enjoyment of the music to control for influencing factors. The data will be analyzed using a linear mixed model with memory recall performance as dependent variable and condition (speech, song), and temporal and pitch predictions as independent variables.