CHILDRENS MEMORY FOR COUNTING-OUT RHYMES - A CROSS-LANGUAGE COMPARISON

In English, counting-out rhymes, such as ''Eenie Meenie,'' vary Little over retellings. Recall is not rote but is sensitive to the structure of the genre. To test the generality of this finding, a sample of Rom anian rhymes was collected. Although there was no overlap with the Eng lish rhymes, the corpus of rhymes collected had similar structure in t erms of number of Lines, repeating words, rhyme, alliteration, and the inclusion of nonsense words. Variation within rhymes preserved the po etic structure of the genre. The results suggest that verbatim recall can be schema driven if there is sufficient structure.