iStock/Getty
Why do we appreciate rhyming words in songs and poetry? How long can one “hold” a sound while waiting for a rhyme?
David Muir
Advertisement
Edinburgh, UK
Rhythm and rhyme help us to remember things. They do this through acoustic encoding, the processing of sounds and words for memory storage and later retrieval.
Rhythm and rhymes
Aid us sometimes
By the means of acoustic encoding.
They help us just fine
To remember each line,
Preventing our brains from exploding.
There is also a predictive pleasure in rhymes. Even before young children have fully learned a nursery rhyme, they will happily shout out the last word of a line when they know what is coming.
Oral history and fictional tales have been more easily passed on when told in rhyme. Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have had a hard job remembering the adventure in his 626-line poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, without the use of rhyme.
Derek Bolton
Sydney, Australia
Poetry invokes metaphor, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration and more. In Dylan Thomas’s Holiday Memory, for example, the line “a hullaballoo of balloons” exploits rhyme, alliteration and a conceptual link between auditory noise and visual noise to convey a colourful cluster.
Through a kind of magical thinking, even purely coincidental links don’t just make the words more memorable, they can also add cogency to political and advertising slogans, and to the sentiments of songs.
Greg Harris
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
You can “hold” a sound while waiting for a poem to rhyme for eight measures. Try it.
Want to send us a question or answer?
Email us at lastword@newscientist.com
Questions should be about everyday science phenomena
Full terms and conditions at newscientist.com/lw-terms
To answer this question – or ask a new one – email lastword@newscientist.com.
Questions should be scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena, and both questions and answers should be concise. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. Please include a postal address, daytime telephone number and email address.
New Scientist Ltd retains total editorial control over the published content and reserves all rights to reuse question and answer material that has been submitted by readers in any medium or in any format.
You can also submit answers by post to: The Last Word, New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES.
Topics:
