Aesthetic Appeal, Rhyme, and their influence on Memorability

Abstract

Aesthetics, despite its implications for the fields of language processing and communication, has remained largely understudied within linguistic research. This paper investigates the aesthetic appeal of rhyme and its potential influence on memory. Since existing literature suggests a correlation between aesthetic appeal and memorability, this study predicts that rhyming sequences would be rated higher in terms of aesthetic appeal and, consequently, be more memorable compared to non-rhyming sequences. To test this hypothesis, I employed a dual-task design consisting of a rating and a memory task. Participants (N=26) were presented with auditory stimuli, rhyming and non-rhyming stanzas, which they evaluated in terms of their aesthetic appeal and had to recognise in a subsequent memory test. The aesthetic rating task required participants to assess the appeal of each sequence on a Likert scale, while the memory task was designed as an item recognition task and tested their ability to recognise the stimuli rather than actively recall them. The analysis focused on recognition accuracy and the correlation between aesthetic ratings and memory performance. Contrary to the original hypothesis, the results did not demonstrate a significant difference in ratings between rhyming and non-rhyming sequences. A slight tendency to recognize rhyming schemes was observed, however, without statistical significance. These findings suggest a need for further investigation into the relationship between aesthetic appeal, rhyme and memorability.