October 2013 - News!

• SSHRC to Present Imagining Canada's Future Six Future Challenge Areas, Thursday, October 17, 2013, 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., Université du Québec à Montréal.
  

For more information, please see the video or contact: Thérèse De Groote, Senior Policy Advisor, SSHRC,  ifca-sica@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca

• Conference announcements of interest to AIRS  (and submission deadlines, as available)
  

2014 will see a plethora of relevant bi- or tri-annual international meetings (ICMPC, ISME, Music and Neuromusic V, International Association of Music and Medicine),  as well as annually held meetings (MIMM Neuromusic, Congress, CAMT, CPA, CSBBCS, OR and more). Members of AIRS are encouraged to take these opportunities to disseminate their work. Deadlines are as early as October 15th.

• Ludke, K. M., Ferreira, F., & Overy, K. (2013). Singing can facilitate foreign language learning.  Memory & Cognition, 2013 .
  

  This study presents the first experimental evidence that singing can facilitate short-term paired-associate phrase learning in an unfamiliar language (Hungarian). Sixty adult participants were randomly assigned to one of three “listen-and-repeat” learning conditions: speaking, rhythmic speaking, or singing. Participants in the singing condition showed superior overall performance on a collection of Hungarian language tests after a 15-min learning period, as compared with participants in the speaking and rhythmic speaking conditions. This superior performance was statistically significant (p < .05) for the two tests that required participants to recall and produce spoken Hungarian phrases. The differences in performance were not explained by potentially influencing factors such as age, gender, mood, phonological working memory ability, or musical ability and training. These results suggest that a “listen-and-sing” learning method can facilitate verbatim memory for spoken foreign language phrases.