…the human accomplishment of lengthy verbatim recall arises as an adaptation to written text and does not arise in cultural settings where text is unknown. The assumption that nonliterate cultures encourage lengthy verbatim recall is the mistaken projection by literates of text-dependent frames of reference. Lengthy verbatim recall (LVR) is a large-scale unit of language performance, namely, the recall with complete word-for-word fidelity of a sequence of 50 words or longer. The criterion is strict. The words and their sequence must be verbatim correct. A close paraphrase does not meet the criterion, nor does recall which is ‘almost’ word for word… My interest in the relations between LVR and text arose from curiosity about a belief that nonliterate cultures encourage feats of work-for-word remembering. The belief runs like this. In the days when no-one could read or write, there were people with such extraordinary memory that they could give word-for-word recitals of sagas, stories, ballads, family histories. The words were written, not in books but in living memory and were passed by word of mouth from person to person and from generation to generation… I met the belief when I was a schoolboy and I accepted it unthinkingly. Years later, I read Bartlett (1932) and became involved in experiments where people listen to stories and try to recall them. In such experiments there is not much word-for-word recall … Do nonliterate cultures really contain people with exceptional word-for-word memory? […]