According to a recent article in the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, preschool-age children have a special talent for memorizing and remembering rhymes. As the Digest explains, a recent study found that, compared to their parents and other older adults, young children are able to recall “nearly twice as many correct words” from the rhyming stories they hear, all while making “far fewer errors.”
Anyone who has been around children for a time would readily affirm such findings. Children, as Oxford scholar Dorothy Sayers noted in 1947, follow three stages of development, the earliest of which she calls the “Poll-Parrot” stage: Continue reading