Rhythm is more than just an aesthetic experience: The rhyme effect on judgments of learning

Abstract

Previous research has extensively examined how various factors (e.g., font size, relatedness) influence Judgments of Learning (JOLs), yet comparatively little is known about whether phonological factors, such as rhyme, similarly influence metacognitive judgments. Across four experiments, the present study investigated how rhyme affects memory performance, JOLs, and metacognitive accuracy, and explored the underlying mechanisms involved. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that rhyme yielded reliable mnemonic benefits only when study involved reading aloud, emphasizing the role of auditory encoding in enhancing memory. Moreover, participants consistently expected higher recall for rhyming than non-rhyming pairs. Experiment 3 confirmed that participants explicitly believed rhyme enhances memorability. Experiment 4 further showed that these beliefs partially mediated rhyme effects on JOLs and that learners updated these beliefs based on study experience. Importantly, despite context-dependent mnemonic benefits, rhyme reduced relative metacognitive accuracy, diminishing item-level discrimination between remembered and forgotten materials. Together, these findings suggest that phonological cues such as rhyme robustly shape metacognitive judgments while sometimes compromising relative accuracy. Practically, instructors and learners should use rhyme judiciously and combine it with more diagnostic cues to support both learning and monitoring accuracy.