Memory: Boost Your Memorization Skills By Repeating Words Aloud

Saying things aloud may help to boost your verbal memory, according to a recent study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

During the study, researchers asked 44 French-speaking university students to read a series of lexemes on a screen. The participants wore headphones that emitted "white noise" to mask their own voices and to eliminate auditory feedback.

From there, they were submitted to four experimental conditions, including the following: repeating in their head, repeating silently while moving their lips, repeating aloud while looking at the screen, and finally, repeating aloud while addressing someone. 

Then, following a distraction task, the participants were asked to identify the lexemes they recalled having said from a list that also included ones that hadn't been used in the test. 

"We knew that repeating aloud was good for memory, but this is the first study to show that if it is done in a context of communication, the effect is greater in terms of information recall," researcher Victor Boucher, said in a statement.

The study findings revealed that repeating words aloud in the presence of someone else greatly helped with memorization, even though the participants heard absolutely nothing. On the other hand, when researchers repeated gestures in their head, they found it least effective in recalling information. 

"The simple fact of articulating without making a sound creates a sensorimotor link that increases our ability to remember, but if it is related to the functionality of speech, we remember even more," Boucher said.

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