I believe it's more contextual as we tend to pair experiences with music more than language. I believe this to be the case because music can be used to evoke speech skills through song when an individual's communication skills have diminished. Please let me know if I have misunderstood your question.

Hi Virginia,

I know that my question is not totally clear and i would try to be more precise with more basic reflections and examples of evrydaylife.

(1) To which kind of information is memory for songs related ? For example, chritsmas songs are related to personal events, episodic or autobiographical memory involving persons (family) and temporal information (childhood exto periences in general)

(2) we all initially encode a song in a specific language. Does it mean that we have different strorage depending of the language envolved when encoding the song ? Does it influence remembering ?

(3) When we try to recall a song, we can often sing the melody but not the words (or only one part). Does it mean that music and words follow different ways during the retrieval process ?

To add a little more.

1. We're finding that music memory is more episodic and autobiographical. When I am working with those with memory loss, I can usually trigger a memory through a song however it is not always a childhood memory. I find that the memories shared tend to be from their young adult years.

2. I work in the suburbs of a large city where many of my clients have been multi-lingual. There have been a few times where I am singing a song in English and they are joining me in their own language at the same time. This leads me to believe that language may only be one part of the memory recall. The specific melody may be a stronger link.

3. I'm not sure I'm fully following your meaning here. Are you stating that people will be able to hum along more frequently than singing? If so, part of this may be that not everyone knew all of the words in the first place. I've had quite a few clients tell me that they do not know the words but recognize the song from their past. It may be necessary to see if they engaged in music through singing or simply listening in the past. It would be less than optimal to judge their response in their state of dementia without knowing their participation in these events in their prior mental state. For example, if the individual's family states that they never heard them sing, we may not either. It's always possible that an individual will change in the course of their dementia, but it's probably a good idea to check before we make a determination which could impact the results of our research.

Does this help?

I would like to add some clarification to the third question you posed. I agree with Dr. Wellman that often people do not know the words, but I imagine that sometimes the words do not come as easily years later as the melody may because of the various locations in the brain to which music is encoded. Whereas language is stored in a specific location, music's encoding happens throughout multiple hemispheres and, though the activation of those areas the words often come back in part. I wonder, if then, the contextual information assists one in remembering certain words or phrases if not the entire song's lyrical contents.

Yes, and the goal is to examine the links (and their respective location) between music and words in L1 and L2 during the retrieval. Some songs are language independant (Happy birthday song with a version in each language known) and other songs are language specific (Like Gracias a la vida - I only know the spanish version of this song).

That sounds like very interesting research. What languages are you using?

I'm just in a preliminary research. I could use english, spanish, french when testing the procedure and the material.

Do you think the romance languages will share more commonalities than others? (Just a thought that occurred)

Oh Yes, more commonalities. In France, we can find easily people with this following combination :

(L1) french (L2) english or spanish (L3) spanish or english.

the second choice is more difficult. Which music style for this kind of study ?

Two Nice groups on Linkedin

(1) Music and emotion

(2) Music psychology (open group)