The Influence of Embedded Music on the Memorization of Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine how embedded music affects verbal memory in the language of Mandarin Chinese. For this purpose, an experiment was conducted where 40 college students were recruited as the participants. Specifically, they were first randomly allocated into four groups, namely the ‘Reading Group’, the ‘Ambient-music Group’, the ‘Embedded-music Group’, and the ‘Finger-tapping Group’. They were then tested for verbal recall of a lyric in terms of both short-term memory and long-term memory. The results showed that the ‘Ambient-music Group’ scored the highest, followed by the ‘Reading Group’, while the ‘Finger-tapping Group’ ranked the third, and the ‘Embedded-music Group’ was at the bottom. The results that the sung version of a lyric was recalled worse than the spoken version conforms to the recent findings, as compared with traditional notions that music can facilitate the memory of language.