ORAL TRADITIONS

Oral traditions depend on human memory for their preservation. Songs or stories from a tradition must be stored in one person's memory and passed to another person who can also remember and retell them. This process must occur over many generations. For example, verses from versions of ballads collected in the 1600s in Great Britain are similar to versions collected since the 1980s in North Carolina. Most of the words have changed, but the basic ideas and poetic structures have not. Similarly, the counting-out rhyme "Eenie meenie" has remained stable, though with much less change, for since the end of the nineteenth century. Rote memorization is not occurring. Rather there is evidence that poetic and meaning rules are being transmitted. Oral traditions must, therefore, have forms of organization and modes of transmission to decrease the changes that human memory usually imposes on verbal material (Rubin, 1995).

The major forms of organization that contribute to stability of oral traditions include imagery, gist, rhyme, alliteration, rhythm, and music.

Imagery is perhaps the most powerful and widespread factor in mnemonic systems. As Allen Paivio (1971) points out, imagery is most effective for concrete (versus abstract), parallel-spatial (versus sequential), and dynamic (versus static) processing. Oral traditions predominantly consist of sequences of concrete actions by active agents, not abstract principles (Havelock, 1978). In ballads, for example, verses that contain concrete, imageable actions are recalled better than ones that do not contain such actions (Wallace and Rubin, 1988).

Meaning or thematic organization plays a large role in adult oral traditions. The cognitive psychologists descriptions of such organization, including schemas, scripts, story grammars, and causal chains can all be used to quantify and describe thematic organization, although the rules for these vary from tradition to tradition. For instance, common scripts in epics include arming a hero or the hero's horse, assembling an army, and joining battle. The scripts are at least as well formed and strict as a college student's knowledge of going to the dentist's office or a fast-food restaurant. The forms of thematic organization allow singers to expand or contract their story at will, as is common in epic (Lord, 1960).

Poetics and music each add their own unique contribution. When two words in a ballad are linked by rhyme or alliteration, undergraduates have a higher recall for them than when the poetics are broken. Furthermore, when ballad singers perform the same ballad twice, they are less likely to change poetically linked words (Wallace and Rubin, 1988). Some genres, such as counting-out rhymes, have nearly all their words poetically linked (Rubin, Ciobanu, and Langston, 1997), whereas others have minimal poetics. Scientists know from the extensive research conducted by Douglas Nelson and Cathy McEvoy (Nelson, 1981) that rhyme cues function differently than meaning cues. It is as if rhyme cues a whole set, while meaning cues, when available, single out the target. Rhyme, as opposed to meaning cues, tends to work best with fast presentation rates, small set size, and strong cue strength—three conditions that tend to be present in the small world of oral traditions. Thus, rhymes have their own peculiar properties, which have been studied extensively and which are often well suited for oral traditions. This trait is true even with subjects not trained to attend to rhyme the way users of many oral traditions are.

Oral traditions are rhythmic. Rhythm functions in at least four ways: (1) rhythm is a constraint, like others, limiting word choice to words with the correct number of syllables or stress pattern; (2) rhythm creates slots that need to be filled, producing a demand characteristic to recall and thereby favors changes within a rhythmic unit rather than errors of omission; (3) rhythm, like meaning, provides an organization, allowing singers to select, substitute, add, or delete whole rhythmic units and continue, and such rhythmic units typically coincide with meaning units in oral traditions (Lord, 1960); and (4) rhythm emphasizes certain locations within lines, that facilitate other constraints, such as the placing of rhyme and alliteration on stressed syllables.

Imagery, meaning, poetics, and music all provide forms of organization or constraint. Once the properties of each form of organization are listed, it is easy to add the constraints together to produce an impressive total degree of constraint. However, more than additive effects are found. For example, although a rhyme or meaning cue by itself may not lead to recall of the last word of a line, when combined they can be effective because there is often only one word that fits them both.

Besides interaction effects that limit word choices, the specific properties of the various forms of organization complement each other. For instance, imagery leads to the original verbal stimulus being transformed into a nonverbal, atemporal representation. When a verbal output is needed, the original words and the order of presentation will not be available for retrieval and will be generated from the image, resulting in changes in wording and the order of ideas. Thematic organization, such as scripts, story grammars, and causal chains, however, function to preserve the temporal order lost by imagery. Even so, in most models of memory, words are translated to and from a more abstract representation that contains none of the sound pattern, allowing for the possibility of translation errors. This remaining lack is remedied by poetics and music, which preserve the sound pattern.

Many strategies of transmission add to the stability provided by the organizational constraints outlined. Songs in an oral tradition are recalled repeatedly after they have been mastered, that is they benefit from overlearning. Moreover, overlearning is usually spaced over time, in some cases once a year when the appropriate season arrives. Overlearning and spaced practice are two of the most powerful factors in maintaining material in memory for long periods. In addition, there are social supports aiding stability. In many genres, only experts who are suited by interest and ability are the active transmitters. They hear their songs from more than one source, which allows better variants to replace inferior ones. Their audience, though it may not be able to supply alternatives, can show approval or disapproval of what it hears.

Bibliography

Foley, J. M. (1988). The theory of oral composition: History and methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Havelock, E. A. (1978). The Greek concept of justice: From its shadow in Homer to its substance in Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kelly, M. H., and Rubin, D. C. (1988). Natural rhythmic patterns in English verse: Evidence from child counting-out rhymes. Journal of Memory and Language 27, 718-740.

Lord, A. B. (1960). The singer of tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nelson, D. L. (1981). Many are called but few are chosen: The influence of context on the effects of category size. In G. H. Bower, ed., The psychology of learning and motivation, Vol. 15. New York: Academic Press.

Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and verbal processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in oral traditions: The cognitive psychology of epic, ballads, and counting-out rhymes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rubin, D. C., Ciobanu, V., and Langston, W. (1997). Children's memory for counting-out rhymes: A cross language comparison. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 4, 421-424.

Wallace, W. T., and Rubin, D. C. (1988). "The wreck of the old 97": A real event remembered in song. In U. Neisser and E. Winograd, eds., Remembering reconsidered: Ecological and traditional approaches to the study of memory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

David C.Rubin