This research approaches the study of human memory through the study of materials that are not distorted or changed in memory; it asks what properties afford these stimuli their stability. Such knowledge will not only advance theory, but will also provide guidance on how to prepare materials to be recalled more accurately, especially for use in situations where written memory aids cannot be used. The research will focus on oral traditions which have been handed down for generations without the aid of writing or other external memory aids. For instance, ballads currently sung on the coast and in the mountains of North Carolina differ only in minor ways from the ballads folklorists collected in the British Isles hundreds of years ago. This research will test singers who do not maintain the stability of their tradition by writing down the old ballads and referring to them; rather, these singers keep the ballads in memory and transmit them by word of mouth. The singers do not learn the ballads in a rote tedious fashion, but rather use the rules and limitations of a good ballad to ease their memory load. In sum, this research will study memory in a natural context where it appears to be working in a near-optimal fashion. The research will employ several methods. One is analysis of ballads and folktales from existing North Carolina collections and those collected in previous research in terms of the meaning, poetic, and musical constraints operating on the songs. These constraints will be used to study the location and kind of changes that occur over historical time as well as within a single singer or story teller. The research will investigate the contribution to the overall stability of memory of each constraint, taken individually or in combination with other constraints. Undergraduates who know little or nothing of the tradition will be asked to learn several ballads to see how their skills at learning imporve with experience. In this way, the development of expertise in learning new, highly structured material will be studied. The research will explore differences that are due to the material being produced orally as opposed to in writing, both for their theoretical and practical importance. Undergraduates will be asked to explain a complex situation either in speech or in writing under various conditions, and the research will analyze differences in the syntax, word choice, and overall organization in these two situations. Differences in production caused by the mode of production have been demonstrated to be substantial. The research project will begin to look at mechanisms for these differences.
