Playing it by ear: Unlocking the mnemonic power of phonemic repetition

Since native speakers have a vast armoury of standardized phrases at their disposal to allow for fluent and accurate language use, it follows that L2 learners need to commit thousands of lexical chunks to their long-term memory if they hold out any hope for achieving near-native proficiency. These phrases are usually presented as arbitrary, which means that students have no choice but to memorize lexical chunks blindly. Should a proportion of these chunks be linguistically motivated, however, exposing those motivations could provide pathways for insightful learning with great mnemonic potential. Cognitive semanticists, for instance, have exploited the mnemonic effect of mental imagery to process figurative expressions. These imagery techniques are, however, primarily beneficial for learners' retention of the meaning of an expression (i.e. to aid comprehension), not for the recollection of its precise lexical composition or form (i.e. to aid re-production). In this paper we contend that the phonological motivation of lexical chunks could account for a much larger segment of phraseology. No less than 20% of English idioms might be motivated by the catchiness of phonemic repetition, typically consonance (e.g. alliteration in time will tell) and assonance (e.g. rhyme in go with the flow). Percentages appear to be even higher (up to 50%) for short expressions such as similes and binomials. After honing in on multiword lexis starting with /b/, /d/, /p/ and /t/ in the MacMillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, we now have statistical evidence that alliteration plays a large part in the precise lexical selection and consequent standardization of many English phrases. We therefore deemed it worthwhile to investigate the pedagogic potential of this phenomenon for L2 instruction. The paper reports on a series of classroom experiments designed to measure the mnemonic effect of (noticing) sound patterns of different degrees of salience in multiword units. In a first experiment, participants were instructed to sort phrases into a non-alliterating and an alliterating set; in an immediate and delayed post-test they were asked to re-produce the phrases of the sorting task. A second experiment was set up to ascertain whether students notice salient sound patterns autonomously, in which case they would not need any teacher-guided instruction to point the patterns out to them. A third experiment compared the recall of alliterative phrases by a control group, whose attention had not been drawn to these salient sound patterns in class, to the recall of an experimental group, whose attention had. A final fourth experiment measured whether assonance, a less salient type of phonological repetition, also holds mnemonic power. Results of the experiments almost univocally suggest that (a) lexical phrases that show alliteration are more easily recalled than non-alliterative ones; (b) even less salient patterns of phonemic repetition, such as assonance, hold promising mnemonic potential; and (c) students benefit from teacher-guided noticing of phonemic repetition. We conclude that attending to phonological motivation in phraseology could serve as a useful means for structural elaboration (i.e. contemplation of form), and therefore help to make L2 phrase-learning a little more feasible.