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egative. Music was found to interfere with recall of digits and had no effect on word recall. Although in this experiment the words were unrelated, so the music was likely to be an additional difficulty.

In many studies, an advantage of sung over spoken presentation has been shown (Calvert & Tart,1993; Chazin & Neuschatz, 1990; Kilgour et al., 2000; McElhinney & Annett, 1996; Rainey & Larsen, 2002;Wallace, 1994; Wolfe & Hom, 1993).The advantage of sung text compared to spoken text at encoding has been attributed to speed (Kilgour et al., 2000) and also to melody simplicity (Wallace, 1994). The idea being that words are pronounced more slowly in a song than a speech. If the sung version of a text is compressed to similar duration of its spoken version the recall difference disappears. This suggests the slower rate of singing compared with speaking is the key variable in song learning ability. (Kilgour et al., 2000).

Another consideration is whether the music and lyrics of a song are processed in such a way that they promote the binding of speech and music sounds at multiple levels of processing. This may explain enhanced memory for relatively distinct representations of both text and melody elements in the same song. (Peretz, Radeau, & Arguin, 2004). The alternative view is that the text and melody of songs are integrated in in a singular representation, especially when singing is required. The central distinction between these two positions is a difference in recall. If the processing is integrated, then recollection of a part of the song will reinstate the whole. For example the melody will reinstate the text. Alternatively if f the processing is separate, the recall of part of the melody may or may not connect with the text. The connection is dependant on the strength of the links.

The idea that melody and text may have a unitary memory trace has been relatively neglected in linguistics but has been studied in perception and memory. The prevailing paradigm in the field involves the recognition of unrelated song lines (Crowder, Serafine, &Repp, 1990; Morrongiello & Roes, 1990; Peretz, Radeau,& Arguin, 2004; and others have found that with song lines melody and text appear to be highly associated. This is even after a single hearing. The suggestion being that lyrics and melody representations are united in memory for songs.

However it is still too early to make clear conclusions as there is increasing evidence that the music and language components of songs maintain autonomy in both perception (Besson, Fa?ta, Peretz, Bonnel, & Requin, 1998; Bonnel, Fa?ta, Peretz, & Besson, 2001) and memory (Crowder et al., 1990, Experiment 3; Peretz, 1996). Recently, these conclusions have been extended by studying brain-damaged patients who suffered from a severe speech disorder without a concomitant musical disorder (Hébert, Racette, Gagnon, & Peretz, 2003; Peretz, Gagnon, Hébert, & Macoir, 2004; Racette, Bard, & Peretz, 2006). These results are indicating that verbal production, both sung and spoken, is mediated by the same (impaired) language output system and the speech route is distinct from the (spared) melodic route. These neuropsychological findings strongly suggest that singing taps into distinct codes for melody and text.

Musicians seem to have better verbal memory than non-musicians (Chan, Ho, & Cheung, 1998;