Are alliterative word combinations comparatively easy to remember for adult learners?

Lindstromberg & Boers (2008a/b) have reported experiments with adult learners of English which revealed a comparative mnemonic advantage afforded by word combinations that display sound patterns such as alliteration (green grass) and assonance (home phone). These findings are relevant for TESOL, given the fact that English phraseology abounds with alliterative and assonant expressions (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2009, chapter 6). The authors recommend classroom interventions that draw learners’ attention to the alliteration or assonance in standardized word strings such as collocations so as to unlock their mnemonic potential. They contend that such interventions are justified because learners are unlikely to take notice of a sound pattern such as alliteration spontaneously, while noticing is widely believed to be a crucial step towards retention (e.g. Schmidt 2001). The mnemonic advantage of alliteration and assonance in Lindstromberg & Boers’ (2008a/b) experiments was attested after tasks that required the participants’ conscious engagement with the given sound pattern. This does not actually preclude the possibility that learners reap some mnemonic benefits of these sound patterns also without being made aware of the sound repetition. In this article, we report a new within-participant experiment in which matched samples of alliterative and non-alliterative word pairs were dictated to upper-intermediate to advanced learners of English. The participants were not briefed about the presence of alliterative stimuli; they were merely asked to repeat each dictated word pair before writing it down. The results of an unannounced free recall test revealed significantly better recall of the alliterative stimuli, but the difference was not at all as pronounced as in the aforementioned experiments, where the participants had engaged in more explicit and more elaborate processing of phonological form