Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte
Jolien Sevenoy
De cabo a rabo: the mnemonics of sound patterns in Spanish L2
vocabulary learning
Masterproef voorgedragen tot het behalen van de graad van
Master in de Meertalige Communicatie
2015-2016
Promotor Prof. Dr. June Eyckmans
Vakgroep Vertalen Tolken Communicatie
1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ......................................................................................... 3
2.1 Vocabulary learning ......................................................................................................... 3
2.1.1 Vocabulary size ......................................................................................................... 3
2.1.2 Depth of vocabulary knowledge ............................................................................... 5
2.2 Multiword combinations .................................................................................................. 6
2.2.1 Terminology.............................................................................................................. 6
2.2.3 The burden of acquiring multiword combinations.................................................... 8
2.3 Cognitive linguistics ...................................................................................................... 11
2.3.1 Semantic elaboration ............................................................................................... 13
2.3.2 Structural elaboration .............................................................................................. 14
2.3.2.3 Alliteration as structural motivation .................................................................... 15
2.3.2.4 Assonance as structural motivation ..................................................................... 17
2.4. Prevalence of sound patterns ........................................................................................ 18
3. EMPIRICAL RESEARCH .................................................................................................. 21
3.1 Research Questions ........................................................................................................ 21
3.2 Corpus study .................................................................................................................. 21
3.3 Materials ........................................................................................................................ 22
3.4 Participants ..................................................................................................................... 25
3.5 Method ........................................................................................................................... 25
4.1 Possible mnemonic advantage of sound patterned idioms ............................................ 29
4.1.1 Pre-test .................................................................................................................... 29
4.1.2 Immediate test control group .................................................................................. 30
4.1.3 Delayed post-test control group .............................................................................. 32
4.2 Comparison of the recall rates in the experimental and the control group .................... 34
6. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................... 41
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 43
8. APPENDIX .......................................................................................................................... 47
8.1 Materials ........................................................................................................................ 47
8.2 Pre-test ........................................................................................................................... 48
8.3 Immediate test ................................................................................................................ 50
8.4 Delayed post-test............................................................................................................ 52
8.5 Study Sheet .................................................................................................................... 54
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Dr. June Eyckmans, for suggesting a topic
for my dissertation and for her continuing support and her useful advice during the past few
months. Moreover, it would not have been possible to conduct my experiment without her help. I
would also like to thank her for her patience and for correcting all the different versions of my
dissertation. Secondly, I am indebted to all the students who participated in my experiment and of
course, Prof. Dr. Sanz Gallego owes my gratitude for allowing me to conduct my experiment
during his classes.
Furthermore, I am indebted to my friends and family for their encouragement and support during
the stressful and strenuous process of writing my dissertation.
Finally, I would like to thank Marth Van Roey and Sander Somers for proofreading my
dissertation and for their useful comments.
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1. INTRODUCTION
In this master dissertation I will investigate whether sound patterns have a positive effect on the
recall of lexical phrases, more specifically idioms, in L2 Spanish. I will examine whether soundpatterned idioms are better recalled by learners than idioms which contain no sound pattern.
Previous studies have shown that certain sound patterns can facilitate the retention of lexical
phrases, especially when the learners’ attention is explicitly directed to the sound pattern
(Lindstromberg & Boers 2008a, 2008b; Boers, Lindstromberg & Eyckmans, 2012). This
dissertation will therefore also look into the role of a pedagogical method when it comes to
unlocking the mnemonic potential of sound patterns in Spanish. I will investigate whether raising
learners’ awareness about the presence of sound patterns by making them look for it in L2 target
items is beneficial for their recall of these items.
Previous research concerning the possible mnemonic effects of sound patterns has mainly
focused on alliteration in L2 English. This can be explained by the high incidence of prototypical
alliteration in English (see chapter 2.4) and by the fact that English is considered a target
language for millions of learners (Boers and Stengers, 2008). Since the prevalence of sound
patterns in any given language depends on the specific typological characteristics of that
language, my investigation of Spanish will be directed at the sound patterns with the highest
incidence in Spanish, namely assonance and alliteration (see Chapter 2.4). Some items included
in the experiment however contain other sound patterns as well, such as rhyme, or even showed
interword overlap across more than one syllable, such as “el oro y el moro”. These sound patterns
are rather rare in English, but seem pervasive in Spanish which is why they are included in this
experiment as well.
Furthermore, I am starting a teacher training programme next year and therefore it might be
useful to gain more insight in useful foreign language teaching techniques. As Sugano (1981)
states, idioms have been neglected in descriptive linguistics and received even less attention in
linguistics applied to language teaching. The instruction of idioms however could increase
learners’ communicative competence considerably (Olimpio de Oliveira, 2006). Moreover, the
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present research may provide a useful teaching technique if the investigated sound patterns turn
out to have mnemonic potential and if awareness raising turns out to unlock this mnemonic
potential.
The first part of this dissertation focuses on the theoretical framework. Firstly, I will focus on
general aspects of vocabulary learning (Chapter 2.1). Secondly, the issue of multiword
combinations is discussed (Chapter 2.2). Relevant terminology will be given, followed by a
discussion of the importance of multiword units. Then, I will discuss a few difficulties which a
learner may encounter while acquiring multiword units. Next, the Cognitive Linguistic approach
to language learning will be discussed (Chapter 2.3) and the notions of semantic and structural
elaboration will be explained. Following that, I will explain how sound patterns, more
specifically alliteration and assonance, can function as structural motivation. Lastly, the
prevalence of sound patterns in English and Spanish will be discussed (Chapter 2.4).
The second part of this dissertation is devoted to the classroom experiment that is the focus of
this dissertation. First of all, I will explain the research questions (Chapter 3.1). Secondly, I will
shortly explain the corpus study I carried out (Chapter 3.2), followed by a discussion of the
materials (Chapter 3.3). Next, I will elaborate on the informants (Chapter 3.4) and the
methodology (Chapter 3.5) that was used. The results of my research will be analysed (Chapter 4)
followed by a discussion (Chapter 5). Lastly, I will summarise the results of my dissertation and
provide a conclusion (Chapter 6).
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2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 Vocabulary learning
2.1.1 Vocabulary size
As Schmitt (2008) states, it is generally agreed upon that vocabulary learning is crucial for
mastering a foreign language. However, according to Eyckmans (2010), it is not until recently
that vocabulary acquisition was recognised as one of the key aspects of acquiring a new
language. Vocabulary learning is seen as quite a burden for a foreign language learner because it
depends on a variety of factors (Schmitt 2008). Therefore, it may be useful to set out a few
learning goals which may help language learners to use the language in the way they want to
(Nation, 2013). An important learning goal would be to acquire a considerable amount of L2
vocabulary because, as Eyckmans (2010) states, vocabulary size is an important criterion to
measure a learner’s fluency. It would of course be ideal if a learner could master the entire
vocabulary of a language. However, this goal is too ambitious since even native speakers do not
know the entire mass of words (Nation, 2013). In order to determine how much vocabulary a
learner needs to know, one could look at the number of words in the language or the number of
words known by native speakers (Nation, 2013).
First of all, to get an idea of how many words a learner needs to acquire, one should get an idea
of how many words a language contains. However, when trying to ascertain how many words
there are in a language, a few methodological difficulties arise. A first question that is posed is
“What do we count as a word?” (Nation, 2013:12). Nation (2013) distinguishes four ways to
count a word.
Firstly, one could consider words as tokens and thus count every word form in a spoken or
written text even if it occurs more than once (Decock, 2012). For instance, the sentence “Today
was a wonderful day, was it not?” would then contain eight words even though the word ‘was’ is
repeated twice. According to Nation, this approach is especially useful if one tries to answer
questions such as “How long is this book?” or “How many words does the average person speak
per minute?” (Nation, 2013: 9).
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A second approach is to consider words as types. The words in a sentence are then counted, but if
a word occurs more than once, it is not counted again. Thus, the sentence “Today was a
wonderful day, was it not?” would then contain seven words or types. Nation concludes that this
approach is mainly useful to answer questions such as “How large was Shakespeare’s
vocabulary?” or “How many words do you need to know to read this book?” (Nation, 2013: 10).
A third way of counting words is to count lemmas. According to Nation, “a lemma consists of a
headword and its inflected and reduced forms” (Nation, 2013:10). Following this approach, the
words “day” and “days” would not be counted as two different words but would be counted as
one single lemma. Behind the use of lemmas as the unit of counting lies the idea of learning
burden, as proposed by Swenson and West (Nation, 2013). As Nation (2013) states, this refers to
the effort required of a learner to learn an item. That is to say, if a learner is familiar with the
inflectional system of a language, the learning burden of the inflected forms becomes negligible
(Nation, 2013). However, a few problems arise with the use of lemmas as counting units. Firstly,
the learning burden is higher for irregular forms and the irregular forms could be counted as
separate lemmas. Secondly, one has to decide which word is the headword, this might be either
the base form or the most frequently used form (Sinclair, 1991: 41-2). An advantage of this
approach is that it greatly reduces the number of units in a corpus (Nation, 2013).
The last approach Nation suggests is to count word families. These are very similar to lemmas
since they also consist of a head word and its inflected forms, but are different in that they also
include the closely related derived forms of a word (Nation, 2013). The major problem which
arises when using word families as counting units, is to decide which words should be included in
a word family and which should not. Therefore, Nation (2013) believes it might be useful to set
up a scale of word families, starting from the most elementary and transparent members and then
moving on to the less obvious possibilities (Bauer and Nation, 1993). Nation (2013) concludes
that the most suitable approach to count a word is dependent on the reason for counting.
Next to the number of words in a language, the number of words known by native speakers is a
second important kind of information (Nation, 2013). Several studies (Goulden et al., 1990;
Zechmeister et al., 1995) show that for English, educated adult native speakers know more or less
20.000 word families. On average, native speakers add a thousand word families to their
vocabulary each year. Nation (2013) believes this is manageable for non-native speakers, but
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points out that it is not what most learners actually achieve.
In conclusion, it is clear that there is no precise amount of words a learner should know, but
setting out a learning goal based on how many words there are in a language and how many
words are known by native speakers could be useful. The research conducted by Nation (2013)
concerns English as an L2. Unfortunately, I have not found any similar studies conducted for
Spanish, but I believe the approach Nation (2013) discusses, would be useful to determine the
amount of vocabulary to be acquired by learners for any L2. Moreover, it is clear that for any L2,
a rather extensive amount of vocabulary should be acquired (Eyckmans, 2010).
2.1.2 Depth of vocabulary knowledge
According to Schmitt (2008), depth of vocabulary knowledge is as important as vocabulary size
in order to use L2 vocabulary in an adequate way. That is to say, the first step in acquiring a
lexical item is establishing a form-meaning link (i.e. acquiring the spoken or written form of a
word along with its meaning), however, if a learner wants to productively use the L2 vocabulary,
his knowledge has to go further than that (Schmitt, 2008).
Schmitt (2008) indicates a range of word knowledge aspects a learner should know (see Figure
1). Schmitt (1998) points out that some of these aspects are learned more easily than others.
Therefore, different teaching approaches are needed in different stages of acquisition. That is to
say, some aspects of word knowledge, such as word meaning and form, should be learned
intentionally, i.e. via explicit teaching. Collocations and intuitions of frequency on the other
hand, which are more difficult to acquire, cannot be learned intentionally but should be acquired
incidentally through numerous exposures to the L2 via reading for instance. This implies that
vocabulary acquisition both entails incidental learning and intentional learning (Schmitt, 2008).
Furthermore, Schmitt (2008) states that one should see vocabulary acquisition as an incremental
process. That is to say, a learner should be exposed to and encounter a lexical item many times in
order to be able to retain it. Moreover, a learner should be exposed to a word in many different
contexts in order to master the different word knowledge types which implies that vocabulary
learning is a long-term recursive process (Schmitt, 2008).
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Figure 1. A range of word knowledge aspects which need to be known (Schmitt, 2008: 333).
2.2 Multiword combinations
2.2.1 Terminology
The focus of this dissertation is the acquisition of L2 vocabulary, more specifically idioms, which
are an example of multiword units and an important aspect of L2 vocabulary. Nation (2013)
distinguishes four kinds of multiword units. Firstly, a multiword unit can be a group of words that
commonly occur together, like “Take a chance” (Nation, 2013: 479). This first kind could also be
referred to as collocations. Secondly, the term can refer to a group of words where the meaning
of the phrase cannot be retrieved from the meaning of the parts of the phrase, as with “By and
large” (Nation, 2013: 479). This second definition refers to idioms. Thirdly, it can be all the
possible combinations of a word or type of word and the accompanying words. Lastly, multiword
units can be seen as formulaic sequences, which Nation defines as “items stored as single
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choices” (Nation, 2013: 479). Wray (2000) lists over 50 terms which can all refer to multiword
units, but prefers the use of the term formulaic sequences and defines these as:
A sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other meaning elements, which is,
or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the
time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar.
(Wray, 2000: 465)
Wray (2000) sees the fact that there are so many terms to describe multiword combinations as
proof of the pervasiveness of these units in language. According to Wray (2000), one possible
explanation for the ubiquity of formulaic sequences in language is the fact that, as stated in the
definition of formulaic sequences, these sequences are stored and learned by learners and native
speakers as a single word and thus have the same function as a content word. However, Nation
(2013) points out that even though these units are stored as a single word or as single choices, this
does not mean they are unanalysed or have a fixed and invariable form.
2.2.2 Importance of multiword combinations
The pervasiveness of multiword units already points to the importance of acquiring these units.
Moreover, Schmitt (2008) stresses their usefulness by referring to the fact that they are used for
different purposes, such as:
[…] expressing a message or idea, (The early bird gets the worm – do not procrastinate),
realizing functions ([I’m] just looking [thanks] declining an offer of assistance from a
shopkeeper), establishing social solidarity (I know what you mean agreeing with an
interlocutor), and transacting specific information in a precise and understandable way
(Blood pressure is 150 over 70) (Schmitt, 2008: 340).
Furthermore, research (Lewis, 1993; Sinclair 2004a; Cheng et al. 2008; Stubbs, 2009) has shown
that the most common sense of a word is not what most learners intuitively expect, but is
revealed in its frequent multiword units. For instance, the most common sense of “see” is not
“see visually” (Nation, 2013: 481). Thus, in order to be aware of the most common sense of a
word, acquisition of a word’s multiword units is needed.
Moreover, knowledge of multiword units may help learners in being more proficient in the L2
and may help them to sound more nativelike (Nation, 2013). As Pawley and Syder (1983) state,
the fact that these multiword units are stored as chunks or as single words in the memory of the
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learners explains how language users can choose the best way to say things from a large range of
possible options (nativelike selection) and can fluently produce language (nativelike fluency).
They argue that this explanation means that most words are stored once as an individual word,
but numerous times in larger stored units (Nation, 2013).
Similarly, Boers et al. (2006) believe that the acquisition of formulaic sequences helps learners in
fluently producing the language in real-time conditions because of the fact that they are stored as
single units in the minds of the learners. Moreover, these chunks can be seen as “zones of safety”
(Boers et al. 2006: 247). That is to say, a characteristic of the use of formulaic sequences is the
absence of hesitation by the speakers while producing the sequence. Therefore, as Boers et al.
(2006) state, hesitations by the speaker only occur in “parts of discourse that connect the prefabricated chunks” (Boers et al. 2006: 247). Chunks can thus be seen as zones of safety since they
limit the risk of erring to the parts of discourse that are in between the formulaic sequences.
According to Decock (2012), knowledge of formulaic language has in fact been found to be
especially beneficial for learners’ oral proficiency. Boers et al. (2006) conducted an experiment
which shows that there is a correlation between the number of multiword combinations used and
oral proficiency. A group of 22 advanced learners of English was exposed to authentic listening
and reading materials. They were divided into an experimental group and a control group. The
experimental group’s awareness of standardised multiword combinations was raised whereas in
the control group the distinction between grammar and vocabulary was upheld. The students’ oral
proficiency was then tested in an interview and the experimental group was perceived to be more
proficient since they used more word combinations.
2.2.3 The burden of acquiring multiword combinations
Acquiring multiword combinations is crucial in order to become fully proficient in a second or
foreign language but it is also considered one of the most daunting tasks for L2 learners. In order
to obtain a nativelike proficiency in the L2, breadth and depth of knowledge are needed (Boers
and Lindstromberg, 2012). However, as Boers et al. (2014) state, several studies show that L2
learners are generally quite slow at acquiring productive knowledge of L2 word combinations
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(e.g., Durrant & Schmitt, 2009; Nekrasova, 2009; Laufer & Waldman, 2010; Li & Schmitt, 2010;
Nekrasova, 2010; Yamashita & Jian, 2010). Remarkably, even advanced L2 learners still produce
word combinations that sound odd to native speakers (Boers et al., 2014). Thus, there remains a
gap between native speakers and second language learners. As Olimpio de Oliveira (2006) states,
native speakers possess a certain pragmatic competence which allows them to interpret figurative
language and select the correct form of a certain idiom whereas non-native speakers need
instruction in order to be able to interpret figurative language.
The fact that the acquisition of formulaic language is such a daunting task for language learners is
often associated with the semantic transparency or opacity of a multiword unit (Boers et al.
2014). This semantic transparency or opacity is, in turn, linked to a word’s compositionality. That
is to say, learners regard a lexical phrase as semantically opaque when the phrase is noncompositional, meaning that the learner cannot deduct the meaning of a multiword unit by
combining the meanings of the constituent words of the unit. For instance, it is possible that a
learner does not know the meaning of “to run a bath” even though he knows the meaning of “to
run” and “a bath”. The word “run” in the expression “to run a bath” should not be interpreted
literally as an intentional act, a rapid motion, but should be interpreted figuratively. An example
in Spanish would be “pan comido” which means “child’s play”. If one would combine the literal
meanings of “pan” and “comido” however, it would mean something similar to “eaten bread”.
Therefore, the expressions ‘to run a bath’ and ‘pan comido’ are non-compositional, semantically
opaque and thus harder for L2 learners to acquire (Boers et al., 2014). Especially idioms are
associated with this notion of non-compositionality. However, as Boers et al. (2014) state, all
multiword units, including collocations, are to some extent non-compositional, which explains
learners’ difficulties in the acquisition.
Furthermore, Second Language Acquisition researchers agree on the fact that learners’ attention
is crucial in order for L2 features to be stored in the learners’ memory (Schmidt, 1990; 2001).
However, paying attention to a multiword unit is not self-evident. Boers et al. (2014) discuss
several factors which determine whether or not a language learner will pay attention to and thus
notice a multiword unit.
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Firstly, post-childhood learners tend to pay more attention to single words rather than to
combinations of words (Wray, 2002). That is because “being used to seeing words separated by
white spaces, adult learners tend to consider words – rather than multiword units – to be the
building blocks of discourse” (Boers et al. 2014: 6). This lack of attention to multiword units
explains the poor rate of uptake of multiword units. Secondly, salience (i.e. being noticeable) is
an important element to explain the uptake and the learners’ attention to multiword units (Boers
et al., 2014). For a language learner, a new word is more salient than a familiar word. Eyetracking experiments for instance, have shown that learners look longer at new words than at
familiar words (Godfroid, Boers & Housen, 2013). The individual words that make up a
multiword unit, however, are frequently familiar words and are therefore less salient to the
learner (Boers et al. 2014). Even though a certain combination of words might be new to the
learner, the fact that the learner regards words as building blocks of discourse, as explained
above, prevents the learner from perceiving the novelty of this combination of words and this
makes the combination less salient (Boers et al. 2014).
Furthermore, perceptual salience plays an important role in learners’ attention to multiword units.
Formulaic sequences that are frequently used by native speakers are often phonetically reduced
and thus less perceptually salient (Bybee, 2002). This way, it is harder for the learner to notice
these sequences since they are less audible and less clearly articulated by the native speaker
(Boers et al., 2014). This phonetical reduction often takes place with words that contribute little
to the meaning of a collocation, such as articles, or prepositions (Boers et al. 2014). Moreover, as
Boers et al. (2014) state, these elements may have a phonological neighbour, meaning a word that
has the same phonemes except for one, which explains why learners might say “in purpose”
instead of “on purpose”. Also, this lack of perceptual and semantic salience might make it harder
for the learner to notice the difference in word choice between the target language and first
language when the learner has a similar collocation available in his first language (Boers et al.
2014). For instance, Dutch learners of English might say “*on the same way” instead of “in the
same way” because they use the expression “op dezelfde manier” in Dutch. Dutch learners of
Spanish might say “*preguntar para” instead of “preguntar por” because they use the expression
“vragen naar” in Dutch.
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As Boers et al. (2014) assert, another obstacle to noticing collocations or other multiword units is
the fact that the constituents of the lexical unit might stand apart from each other, as is the case in
the following sentence: “The bill which was due the 27th of February is still not paid” or “La
cuenta que se debió el 27 de febrero todavía no se ha pagado”. This makes it harder for the
learner to associate both words. However, frequent encounters of word combinations may
facilitate association (Boers et al., 2014). Moreover, as Wray (2000) states, idioms, which are the
focus of this dissertation, lack morphosyntactic flexibility. That means that they hardly allow
elimination or addition for instance and it is thus difficult to place the different lexical units of an
idiom apart from each other.
Lastly, learners may confuse word combinations that are similar in form (Boers et al. 2014). For
instance, learners might say “do a business with someone” instead of “do business with someone”
or “dar paseo” instead of “dar un paseo”. Moreover, verbs, especially in verb-noun collocations,
often have an abstract meaning which makes it harder for the learner to remember the verb. The
more concrete a word is, the easier it is retained by the learner (Boers et al. 2014).
It is clear that the acquisition of multiword combinations is not hassle-free. What follows is a
discussion of the Cognitive Linguistics (henceforth CL) approach which may facilitate the
acquisition of multiword units and of vocabulary in general.
2.3 Cognitive linguistics
The Cognitive Linguistics (henceforth CL) movement is a reaction to generative linguistics,
which was felt to consider language too much as a special-purpose component. Moreover, it was
considered as too far away from general cognition and the way language is used in daily life
(Boers, 2013). According to Boers (2013), the CL approach treats language as usage-based and as
a reflection of the general cognitive abilities that take place in our interaction with the world.
Moreover, the foundational point of the CL approach is that language is all about meaning,
whereas generative linguistics thinks of language primarily in terms of form (Geeraerts, 2006).
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From the CL point of view, linguistic phenomena are considered motivated. Boers (2013)
explains the concept of linguistic motivation by pointing out that if language were not motivated,
an expression such as “all this good news is getting me down”, would not sound odd to us.
People automatically associate happiness with being up instead of down which probably has
something to do with the fact that happy people are mostly up and about (Boers, 2013). It is
however important to emphasise that “motivated” is no synonym for “predictable” (Boers, 2013).
That is to say, one can give a plausible explanation for why a certain way of formulating a
message has become standardised, but one cannot predict what will become standardised. As
Boers (2013) states, efforts of the CL approach to describe language as motivated may be
beneficial for language pedagogy precisely because this motivation is often not downright
obvious for the learner.
This linguistic motivation is assumed to be beneficial for the retention of words and for language
learning in general (Baker 1998; Boers 2000; Charteris-Black 2000). That is to say, the CL
approach attempts to make vocabulary more memorable through the (re-) establishment of
associations with the basic uses words are derived from. This can occur by simply informing or
reminding the learners of the literal meaning of a word which is used in a figurative way (Boers,
2013). Additional stimuli for cognitive engagement can be given. For instance, learners can make
an educated guess at the meaning or pictures could be used to explain the meaning (Boers et al.
2008; Boers, 2013).
Another way in which the CL approach attempts to make the learning of idioms and phrasal
verbs easier is by explaining how these idioms and verbs give rise to common conceptual
metaphors. As Boers (2013) exemplifies, “he’s hot under the collar”, “she was fuming”, “he’s
blowing off steam”, “simmer down” and “don’t add fuel to the fire” all instantiate the metaphors
THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE EMOTIONS and ANGER IS HEAT (in the CL
approach, the use of capital letters is common to refer to conceptual metaphors). In order to
stimulate further cognitive engagement, learners can be asked why a certain conceptual metaphor
makes sense or they can look for similar metaphors in their mother tongue (Deignan, Gabrys &
Solska 1997). Similar to the previous thread, the use of imagery or having the learners make an
educated guess could also help (Boers, 2013).
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Boers (2013) observes a connection with the Levels of Processing Theory (Cermak & Craik
1979, Cohen et al. 1986) which states that deep mental processing is needed to develop long-term
retention. In the field of vocabulary learning, this deep mental processing is called elaboration
(Barcroft 2002). Barcroft (2002) distinguishes two types of elaboration: semantic and structural
elaboration.
Semantic elaboration refers to an increased attention for an L2 lexical item with respect to its
meaning. Structural elaboration, on the other hand, refers to an increased attention for the
(phonemic, graphemic) form of the L2 lexical item. Since the foundational point of the CL
approach is that language is all about meaning, this approach is most closely related to semantic
elaboration. Generative linguistics on the other hand focus on form and are thus more closely
related to structural elaboration.
It is generally agreed upon that the notion of elaboration is crucial in memory studies and might
facilitate the acquisition of lexical items (Barcroft 2002, 2004; Boers and Lindstromberg 2008,
2009; Eyckmans, 2010). What follows is a discussion of the concepts of semantic and structural
elaboration and their importance in facilitating the acquisition of multiword units.
2.3.1 Semantic elaboration
Semantic elaboration refers to an increased attention for an L2 lexical item with respect to its
meaning, hence the name. As Eyckmans (2010) states, when aiming for retention of meaning and
in-depth comprehension, semantic elaboration is the ideal path.
For this type of elaboration, mental imagery may be very useful (Boers et al. 2004, Boers &
Lindstromberg 2009, Boers 2013), which ties in with the Dual Coding Theory. This theory holds
that the recall of words in a foreign or second language may be facilitated through associations
between verbal and non-verbal information, thus between the idiom and a mental image (Paivio
1986; Clark and Paivio 1991). To illustrate this, Boers et al. (2004, 2007) refer to etymological
elaboration, a form of semantic elaboration. By drawing the learners’ attention to the
etymological roots of metaphoric and metonymic idioms, learners are stimulated to construct
mental images of the idiom. In other words, the meaning of idioms is presented as semantically
motivated rather than as arbitrary which could encourage insightful learning and retention in the
learners’ long-term memory (Boers & Stengers, 2008). Unfortunately, many chunks are neither
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metaphoric nor metonymic and, as Boers et al. (2006b) state, this method is not applicable to all
L2 learners since not all learners are prone to use these mental pictures in order to retain
multiword units or chunks. Moreover, semantic elaboration is not sufficient if learners are to
recall the precise form of words or the lexical composition of phrases, which is essential for
language production (Boers and Lindstromberg, 2008). Structural elaboration is thus a necessary
complement if the goal is productive use of vocabulary (Eyckmans et al., 2015)
2.3.2 Structural elaboration
Structural elaboration comes in many forms. For instance, one could count the letters of a word
or look at the spelling (Decock, 2012). The most relevant form of structural elaboration for this
dissertation however is motivation through sound patterns. As stated in Chapter 2.3.1, semantic
motivation cannot explain the precise lexical composition of phrases. For instance, it cannot
reveal why the standard Spanish phrase is “ser corriente y moliente” instead of “ser habitual y
moliente” or why the standard English phrase is “it takes two to tango” instead of “it takes two to
waltz’ (Boers and Lindstromberg, 2008). This is where phonological motivation comes in. As
Boers and Lindstromberg (2008) state, it seems that word strings which are pleasant-sounding are
preferred over word strings which are not pleasant-sounding but have the same meaning. For
instance, alliteration and assonance help motivate the precise lexical makeup of numerous
compounds (e.g. pickpocket and playmate), idioms (e.g. publish or perish and the name of the
game) and many other phrases (Boers and Lindstromberg, 2008: 330).
It is generally assumed that catchy sound patterns may have a mnemonic effect and may help in
the retention of idioms (Boers, Lindstromberg & Eyckmans, 2012). However, empirical research
to support this thesis is sparse. In the following chapter, I will discuss the existing empirical
evidence concerning the mnemonic benefits of two sound patterns, namely alliteration and
assonance.
15
2.3.2.3 Alliteration as structural motivation
When conducting an experiment on etymological elaboration (cf. supra), Boers et al. (2004a,
2004b) found that alliterative idioms were more memorable than non-alliterative idioms. No
specific attention was given to sound repetition, yet the alliterative expressions were retained
better than the non-alliterative expressions. Boers and Lindstromberg (2005) also investigated
whether maximising the noticing activities, and thus raising learners’ awareness, enhanced this
observed mnemonic effect of alliteration on the recall of lexical phrases. This experiment took
place over a three-month period during which a group of 25 upper-intermediate learners was
regularly exposed to a variety of TV and radio recordings. Students had to listen to the recordings
and report its contents to the class group. Moreover, they were asked to complete fill-the-gap
exercises and the teacher frequently drew the students’ attention to sound patterns, mostly
alliteration. At the end of the three-month course, an unannounced test took place. Students were
asked to complete the test, using 23 expressions that had been tackled in the three-month course.
From these 23 expressions, 5 were alliterative. Results showed that students clearly recalled the
alliterative phrases better than the non-alliterative phrases. These results led Boers and
Lindstromberg to assume that drawing learners’ attention to alliteration in multiword units could
indeed enhance the mnemonic effect (Boers & Lindstromberg 2005). Furthermore, Boers et al.
(2006) conducted an experiment in which they found that by raising the learners’ awareness of
the L2 formulaic sequences, learners were able to build up a slightly larger repertoire of L2
formulaic sequences than learners whose awareness was not raised. This finding was later
confirmed in experiments conducted by Lindstromberg and Boers (2008a)
To answer the question whether alliteration also has mnemonic benefits when the learners’
awareness is not raised Boers et al. (2012) conducted an experiment in which learners were not
made aware of alliteration. A set of 30 phrases was dictated to the informants of which 7 were
alliterative. The phrases were read twice by the teacher and students had to repeat them and write
them down. After a short intermission, students were then asked to write down as many of the
phrases as they could remember. Once again, results showed that students were able to recall the
alliterative phrases more easily than the non-alliterative phrases. However, it should be noted that
the observed mnemonic effect of alliteration was much smaller than in the previous experiments
in which the learners’ awareness was raised (Boers et al., 2014a). Moreover, as Boers et al.
16
(2014a) state, no delayed post-test took place. Therefore, it was not clear whether the observed
mnemonic advantage was durable.
In order to fill this gap, Boers et al. (2014a) conducted two new experiments. For the first
experiment, a set of 22 two-word phrases was dictated to 36 undergraduate language majors, of
which 5 showed alliteration. Students were asked to repeat the phrases and write them down. No
information about sound repetition was given to the students. Students then handed in the written
phrases and after a few minutes an immediate post-test took place and one week later a delayed
post-test was administered. Results showed that students were able to recall the alliterative
phrases more easily during the immediate test, yet during the delayed post-test there was no
significant benefit noted of the alliterative phrases. However, since the paired alliterative and
control collocations shared the same leftward constituent, the recall of one phrase may in turn
have primed recall of the other phrase (Boers et al., 2014a). Moreover, they point out that the
students’ exposure to the dictated items was very short and it could thus be expected that students
would forget the items. Therefore, Boers et al. (2014a) conducted a similar experiment with
different test items and a longer engagement. For this experiment, 47 undergraduate students
were given a sheet with 28 two-word phrases, which had no words in common. The phrases were
called out twice and students were asked to repeat them. Different from the previous experiment,
before dictating the new phrase, students were asked to score the phrase based on whether they
had used, heard or read it frequently. After a short intermission, a free recall test took place and
students were asked to write down as many of the dictated phrases as possible. Subsequently, a
cued recall test took place in which the researcher dictated the first word of the phrase and
students had to write down the second word. One week later, both tests were repeated. Similar to
the first experiment, no significant mnemonic advantage was noted for alliteration. From these
experiments, it can be concluded that awareness raising plays an important role in unlocking the
mnemonic potential of alliteration (Boers et al., 2014a).
17
2.3.2.4 Assonance as structural motivation
Concerning the mnemonic potential of assonance, three small-scale experiments have been
conducted. The first relevant study was conducted by Lindstromberg and Boers (2008b) and
involved a sorting task. Informants were asked to form pairs and one person was then given 24
English collocations of which 12 were assonant and the remaining 12 were neither assonant nor
alliterative. The informants who were given the 24 collocations dictated them to their partner.
Next, they were asked to sort the collocations into an assonant set and a non-assonant set.
Subsequently, all informants were asked to list all collocations they were able to remember. One
week later, the informants were given 48 collocations, 24 of these collocations were the original
collocations the informants had worked with the week before. They were then asked to indicate
those. It appeared that the assonant collocations were most often recalled.
A replication of this study was carried out by Boers et al. (2014b). They used a new set of 20
collocations containing 14 collocations with the same leftward collocate (e.g. traffic light and
traffic jam) and 6 collocations with the same rightward collocate (e.g. handsome man and
reliable man). The goal was to see whether the assonant collocations were recalled more often
than the non-assonant collocations even though the informants did not engage in a sorting task.
They did so in order to make sure that the recall advantage for assonant collocations found by
Lindstromberg and Boers (2008b) was not influenced by the sorting task which may have led
them to regard the assonant collocations as more important than the non-assonant collocations. In
this test, only a small recall advantage was found for the assonant phrases which led the
researchers to conclude that if the learners’ attention is not directed towards the assonance, the
mnemonic advantage of assonance decreases.
A second replication of the first experiment was conducted by Boers et al. (2014b) using the
same set of 20 collocations. This replication followed the same method as the first experiment but
was different in that the learners’ awareness was raised and their attention was thus directed
towards the assonance. A teacher read the collocations out loud and students were asked to repeat
them twice before writing them down. The teacher explained what assonance was and then asked
the participants to indicate the assonant phrases with a plus sign. Subsequently, three post-tests
followed. In all three tests, the assonant phrases were recalled most often. Moreover, the
18
mnemonic advantage of assonance was even clearer in the one-week delayed post-test.
Researchers thus concluded that pointing the learners’ attention towards the assonance
strengthens the mnemonic advantage of assonance. However, it is not clear whether assonance
might have a positive influence on the recall of L2 lexical phrases if the learners’ awareness of its
presence is not raised and learning is thus incidental (Boers et al., 2014b). As Lindstromberg and
Boers (2008b) state, it is clear that assonance is not easily identified by L2 learners since it is a
less salient sound pattern than alliteration. Therefore, it could be difficult to find a mnemonic
effect of assonance if the learners’ attention is not drawn towards the phonemic repetition.
2.4. Prevalence of sound patterns
It is important to note that the prevalence of sound patterns in any given language depends on the
specific typological characteristics of that language (see Chapter 1). Boers and Stengers (2006)
argue that a prosodic distinction should be made. On the one hand, there are stress-timed
languages, such as English and Dutch since these lean towards stress-timed rhythm. On the other
hand, French and Spanish lean towards syllable-timed rhythm and are thus syllable-timed
languages. The prototypical form of alliteration (e.g. carros y carretas) ought to be more
common in stress-timed languages since word stress is placed at the beginning of the word (Boers
& Stengers, 2006). It should be noted however that some believe that certain languages are not
syllable-timed languages, nor stress-timed languages. Moreover, Boers and Stengers (2006) state
that:
Dutch (a so-called stress-timed language along with English) is much less prone to
alliteration than English, which suggest that the prosodic typology cannot be the whole
story. (Boers & Stengers, 2008: 7).
Therefore, a second distinction is made, namely between fixed-word-order languages with poor
inflection and loose-word-order languages with rich inflection (Boers & Stengers, 2008). As
Boers and Stengers (2008) state, languages with richer inflection, such as Spanish, ought to be
less prone to alliteration since inflection makes words longer and thus creates a greater distance
between word-initial consonants that are repeated. Moreover, they claim, fixed word order may
enhance the presence of phonological patterns since word combinations are then more likely to
19
be reiterated and consequently more likely to become standardised.
Results of Boers and Stengers’ (2008) experiment show that alliteration was most frequently
present in English idioms, and less in Spanish and Dutch idioms, yet still relatively common (see
Figure 2). Assonance was most frequently present in Spanish, but on the whole much less
common than alliteration. These results thus contradict their hypothesis that poor-inflection,
fixed-word-order languages are more likely to present (prototypical) alliteration. They also state,
however, that more research on this hypothesis is needed, with other languages for instance,
before generalised statements can be made.
However, what was confirmed was the hypothesis that there is a phonological motivation for the
exact lexical composition of idioms. For Spanish (see Figure 2) 15,78% of the idioms showed
either alliteration or assonance. So, the fact that 15% of Spanish idioms can be phonologically
motivated is welcome news to L2 learners facing the challenge of learning Spanish (phraseology)
(Boers & Stengers, 2006).
Figure 2. Alliteration and assonance in English, Dutch and Spanish idioms (Boers and Stengers,
2008: 72).
20
21
3. EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
3.1 Research Questions
This dissertation will focus on two research questions. Firstly, it is investigated whether sound
patterned idioms are easier to recall compared to idioms which contain no sound patterns.
Secondly, I will discuss whether awareness raising might unlock the mnemonic potential of those
sound patterns. That is to say, I will investigate whether informants whose attention was directed
to the sound patterns recalled more target phrases than informants who were not made aware of
the presence of the sound patterns. This dissertation might thus provide more evidence for the
possible mnemonic advantage of sound patterns in recalling L2 idioms.
3.2 Corpus study
In order for this study to be relevant for the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language, the
investigated sound patterns should of course be relatively prevalent in Spanish formulaic
language. At the beginning of my research, I meant to investigate one specific sound pattern,
namely assonance. In order to get an idea of the prevalence of assonance in Spanish, I started
counting the number of assonant multiword units in “Redes” (Bosque, 2004), a Spanish
combinatorial dictionary. I selected a thousand units from Redes per letter for the letters A, B, C
and D and counted how many of these selected units showed assonance. Figure 3 gives an
overview of the counts. As Figure 3 shows, 21,7% of the units for the letter A showed assonance.
For the letter B, 34,8% showed assonance. For the letters C and D 27,2% and 32,6% were
assonant, respectively.
The corpus study was too time-consuming however. Moreover, while counting these multiword
units, I noted that other sound patterns were prevalent in Spanish formulaic language as well,
such as alliteration and rhyme. Therefore, I decided to expand the scope of my research and
included these sound patterns as well. Moreover, I decided to consult a different corpus, namely
“Hablar por los codos” (Vranic, 2004) since Redes (Bosque, 2004) included all sorts of
multiword combinations and I wanted to focus on idioms in particular.
22
Figure 3. Overview of the counts in ‘Redes’ (Bosque, 2004) which show the amount of assonant
units (in %) for the letters A, B, C and D.
3.3 Materials
For my experiment, I selected a set of Spanish idioms from a book called ‘Hablar por los codos’
(Vranic, 2004). I balanced out the material used for my experiment in terms of length, frequency
and imageability. Firstly, in order to find out how frequent the chosen assonant and alliterative
idioms were, I consulted two online corpora: CREA and Collins. It was important that the chosen
idioms were rather common in Spanish in order for the acquisition of the phrases to be useful for
the learners. Therefore, I only selected those idioms which appeared more than ten times in both
corpora. As Table 1 shows, the idioms containing a sound pattern (SP items) appeared, on
average, 55,2 times in CREA and 63,4 times in Collins. The idioms containing no sound pattern
(NSP items) on the other hand appeared, on average, 38,2 times in CREA and 36,2 times in
Collins.
SP items
NSP items
CREA
55,2 (SD=45,3)
38,2 (SD=22,9)
Collins
63,4 (SD=51,9)
36,2 (SD=35,3)
Table 1. Overview of the frequency of the items containing a sound pattern (SP items) and the
items containing no sound pattern (NSP items) in CREA and Collins.
23
When selecting the material, I also paid attention to the number of syllables each idiom
contained. It was important that all the selected idioms contained more or less the same number
of syllables to make them all equally memorisable. On average, the sound-patterned idioms
contained 7 syllables whereas the idioms containing no sound patterns contained on average 6
syllables. All items included contained between 5 and 10 syllables, except for “traer cola” and
“dar el pego”, which contain four syllables and “tirarse los trastos a la cabeza”, which contains 11
syllables (see Appendix 8.1).
After having balanced out the material in terms of frequency and length, I presented the idioms to
Prof. Dr. Guillermo Sanz Gallego, a native speaker of Spanish, in order to assure all idioms were
still frequently used in Spanish. After this consultation, I adjusted my material since some of the
idioms were considered rather archaic and came to a set of 34 frequently used Spanish idioms
(see Table 2).
As in Boers et al. (2014) The items used for my experiment were also checked on their
imageability (i.e. how easily learners form an image that is visual or involves movement) since a
study conducted by Steinel et al. (2007) showed that imageability might facilitate idiom learning.
Therefore, it was important all idioms had more or less the same degree of imageability. The
idioms were rated on a scale of 1 (difficult to form an image) to 9 (extremely easy to form an
image). On average, the sound-patterned idioms were rated a 5 out of 9 (SD=1,6) whereas the
idioms containing no sound pattern were, on average, rated 4 (SD=1,5).
The idioms used for the experiment can be seen in Table 2. From these idioms, 15 were sound
patterned whereas the remaining 15 idioms contained no sound pattern. These 30 idiomatic
expressions were then used for the pre-test, immediate test and post-test and were explained on
the study sheet that was given to the informants. Additionally, four fillers were included in the
pre-test, immediate test and study sheet. These fillers figured at the beginning and end of the test
and were also frequent expressions. The filler items were included because it is generally
assumed that the first and last items figuring in a list are better retained by informants. The fillers
were thus used to lower primacy and recency effects (Boers et al., 2014). They did not figure in
24
the post-test however and were not taken into account when calculating the informants’
performance on the pre-test and immediate test.
SP items
NSP items
Filler items
A troche y moche
A la primera de cambio
Hacer
algo
a
ojos
cerrados
A trancas y barrancas
Hacer un brindis al sol
Al pie de la letra
Ser corriente y moliente
Saltarse algo a la torero
Dar carta blanca
El oro y el moro
Caja de Pandora
De primera mano
De cabo a rabo
En camisa de once varas
Caer en la cuenta
Dar el pego
Con las manos en la masa
Dar la puntilla
El todo por el todo
Un toma y daca
Coger el toro por los cuernos
Viento en popa
Matar dos pájaros de un tiro
Coger el portante
Paso en falso
A grito pelado
Bajar la guardia
Traer cola
Tirarse los trastos a la cabeza
A paso de tortuga
Poner puertas al campo
A pedir de boca
Caballo de batalla
Capear el temporal
Table 2. Overview of the sound-patterned idioms (SP items), the non-sound patterned idioms
(NSP items) and the filler items used for the experiment.
25
3.4 Participants
The data for my empirical research was collected in March at the Faculty of Applied Linguistics
in Ghent during the course “Spaanse Taalstructuren C”. The participants were all enrolled in the
second year of a bachelor’s programme in Applied Linguistics. At the beginning of the bachelor
programme in Applied Linguistics, students choose two different foreign languages. All
informants that took part in this study, chose Spanish as one of their foreign languages. The pretest, immediate test and post-test were administered in two intact classes during the course
“Spaanse Taalstructuren” in three consecutive weeks. Students were randomly allocated to the
experimental and control condition. This resulted in a total number 65 participants who
participated in the treatment and the immediate test (26 in the experimental group and 39 in the
control group). The delayed test (one week later) counted 59 participants (of which 27 in the
experimental group and 32 in the control group).
Initially, the imageability ratings were meant to be given by the informants who participated in
the experiment. However, due to circumstances, these ratings were given after the experiment
had already been conducted. I asked 12 of my fellow students to fill out the imageablity rating
form. These students were all enrolled in the first year of a master’s programme in Multilingual
Communication, which follows the bachelor’s programme in Applied Linguistics. All informants
chose Spanish as one of their two chosen foreign languages and their proficiency in Spanish is
comparable to the proficiency of the informants who participated in the experiment.
3.5 Method
The informants were divided into two groups: a control group and an experimental group. The
control group’s awareness was not raised as opposed to the experimental group whose attention
was directed to the sound patterns during the treatment. The study consists of three steps: a pretest, immediate test and treatment, and a delayed post-test.
During the pre-test, the informants in the experimental and control group were given a set of 34
Spanish lexical phrases (see Appendix 8.2). This test served to find out whether the informants
were already acquainted with some of the lexical phrases included in the test. The phrases that
26
were already known by the informants were not taken into account when calculating the learning
gain of the informants, thus the number of lexical phrases the students were actually able to
acquire thanks to the learning treatment. It was emphasised that none of the tests would be taken
into account for the informants’ marks on the course “Spaanse Taalstructuren C”.
One week after the pre-test, the treatment and immediate took place. In both groups, I once again
explained that the informants’ results on the tests would not be taken into account for their mark
on the course “Spaanse Taalstructuren C”. I did however point out that some of the lexical
phrases might figure in the exam in June in order to keep their attention and to motivate them.
The treatment in both groups differed. In the experimental group, I explained that it is important
to acquire idiomatic expressions in a foreign language in order to become proficient and fluent in
the foreign language. Moreover, I explained the difference between collocations and idioms and
told the informants that the lexical phrases included in the test were idioms. Furthermore, I
explained why it is difficult for non-native speakers to acquire formulaic language by clarifying
the concept of non-compositionality (see Chapter 2.2.3), which is the biggest obstacle in
acquiring idiomatic expressions. Lastly and most importantly, I told the informants in the
experimental group about studies which have shown that certain sound patterns, such as
assonance and alliteration may facilitate the memorisation of idiomatic expressions. Moreover, I
explained how they could recognise alliteration and assonance by defining these phonemic
patterns and by giving examples. Subsequently, the informants were given a study sheet with the
34 lexical phrases from the pre-test, all accompanied by an example sentence to illustrate the use
of the lexical phrases. Furthermore, a clear and elaborate explanation of the idiomatic expressions
was given (see Appendix 8.5). Then, I explained that I was going to read all 34 lexical phrases
out loud and asked the informants to indicate the alliterative and assonant lexical phrases and
asked them to pinpoint the spot where the assonance or alliteration could be found. While reading
the lexical phrases out loud, I paid attention to the correct pronunciation of the words in order to
make sure that the students would be able to indicate the assonance or alliteration. After having
read all 34 phrases, students were given more or less 15 minutes to study the phrases. They were
also informed that a test would follow. After studying the phrases, the participants were given
more or less more or less 15 minutes to fill out the immediate test (see Appendix 8.3). The
allocated time to fill out the immediate test proved sufficient. In the immediate test, the 34 lexical
27
phrases from the pre-test and study sheet appeared in a different order in order to make sure the
informants focused on the formal features of the idioms instead of on the order in which they
appeared.
The control group on the other hand, was given less information during the treatment. At first,
they were given the same information about why it is important to acquire formulaic language
and I also explained the concept of non-compositionality. Their treatment however, was different
in that I did not mention the possible mnemonic advantages of assonance or alliteration. I did not
explain how assonance or alliteration could be recognised and they were not asked to indicate
these sound patterns on the study sheet. The following steps of the treatment were similar to those
in the experimental group: I read the lexical phrases out loud focusing on the correct
pronunciation. Next, they were also given more or less 15 minutes to study the phrases and
subsequently they had to fill out the immediate test. Once again, the allocated time proved
sufficient.
One week after the treatment and immediate test then, the delayed post-test took place. Students
were not informed about this test beforehand. This test served to find out how many lexical
phrases the informants were able to memorise one week after the treatment and immediate test.
The delayed post-test figured 30 lexical phrases instead of 34 since the four fillers from the pretest and immediate test were left out (see Appendix 8.4). Moreover, the phrases were once again
presented in a different order. The participants were given more or less 15 minutes to fill out the
post-test. The informants were given the first letters of the content words and an explanation of
the lexical phrase, as in “Ser C_______y M________ No ser nada especial”. No further
instructions were given except that I wanted to see how many lexical phrases they were able to
recall. For the delayed post-test, fifteen minutes proved sufficient as well.
28
29
4. RESULTS
Since there are two main research questions to be answered, the results chapter will be divided
into two parts. The first part will deal with the first research question, namely whether idioms
containing a sound pattern are easier to recall compared to idioms containing no sound pattern.
This part will give an overview of how well the sound patterned idioms were recalled by the
informants compared to the idioms containing no sound pattern.
The second part of this chapter is concerned with the second research question, namely whether
awareness raising helps in unlocking the mnemonic potential of sound patterns. In order to
answer this question, the gain scores of the experimental group - whose awareness was raised and the gain scores of the control group – whose awareness of the sound patterns was not raised will be compared.
4.1 Possible mnemonic advantage of sound patterned idioms
The first research question to be answered for this dissertation is whether sound patterns have a
mnemonic advantage. More specifically: are sound patterned idioms easier to recall compared to
phrases containing no sound pattern? In order to answer this question, I will first discuss the
results from the pre-test for both the experimental group and control group. At the time of the
pre-test, the informants from the experimental group had not yet received the instruction to look
for sound patterns in the material. Therefore, their results from the pre-test are taken into account
as well. Secondly, results for the immediate test and delayed post-test from the control group are
given. Results from the experimental group for the immediate test and delayed post-test are
disregarded since those informants had been made aware of the presence of sound patterns during
the learning phase.
4.1.1 Pre-test
First of all, results from the pre-test show that the informants were familiar with the majority of
the items. That is to say, 19 out of 30 idioms were not known by any of the informants. The best
known idiom of the set was ‘caer en la cuenta’, which was known by 25 informants (see Table 3).
30
Table 3 shows that, on average, the sound patterned idioms (SP items) were known by 5,5
participants whereas the idioms containing no sound pattern (NSP items) were, on average,
known by 1,7 informants. This difference was shown to be significant at p < .001. In view of the
comparable frequency, length and imageability of both idiom sets, this finding seems to point to
the higher inherent memorability of sound patterned idioms.
SP items
Known
NSP items
Known
A troche y moche
0
A la primera de cambio
0
A trancas y barrancas
0
Hacer un brindis al sol
2
Ser corriente y moliente
0
Saltarse algo a la torera
0
El oro y el moro
6
Caja de pandora
18
De cabo a rabo
1
En camisa de once varas
0
Caer en la cuenta
25
Dar el pego
0
Con las manos en la masa
0
Dar la puntilla
0
El todo por el todo
12
Un toma y daca
0
Coger el toro por los cuernos
16
Viento en popa
0
Matar dos pájaros de un tiro
6
Coger el portante
0
Un paso en falso
9
A grito pelado
0
Bajar la guardia
7
Traer cola
0
Poner puertas al campo
0
A paso de tortuga
6
Tirarse los trastos a la cabeza
0
A pedir de boca
0
Caballo de batalla
0
Capear el temporal
0
Mean
5,5(SD=7,5) Mean
1,7(SD=4,8)
Table 3. Overview of how many informants in the experimental and control group (n=69)
knew the sound-patterned idioms (SP items) and items containing no sound pattern (NSP
items) during the pre-test.
31
4.1.2 Immediate test control group
Table 4 shows that during the immediate test, the sound-patterned idioms (SP items) were, on
average, correctly recalled by 26,5 informants from the control group whereas the non-sound
patterned idioms (NSP items) were, on average, correctly recalled by 18,5 informants from the
control group.
The control group was given an explanation of each idiom and they were told to memorise the
idioms, as explained in Chapter 3.5, but nothing was mentioned about sound patterns or their
possible mnemonic advantage. This shows that even though the control group received no
treatment to enhance their awareness of the presence of sound patterns in the material, the items
containing sound patterns led to higher retention rates than the items containing no sound pattern.
A sign test showed the difference in mean scores to be significant at p < .001.
32
SP items
Correctly
NSP items
Correctly
A troche y moche
recalled
12
A la primera de cambio
recalled
21
A trancas y barrancas
13
Hacer un brindis al sol
23
Ser corriente y moliente
30
Saltarse algo a la torera
19
El oro y el moro
37
Caja de pandora
31
De cabo a rabo
34
En camisa de once varas
14
Caer en la cuenta
28
Dar el pego
14
Con las manos en la masa
26
Dar la puntilla
21
El todo por el todo
35
Un toma y daca
18
Coger el toro por los cuernos
34
Viento en popa
22
Matar dos pájaros de un tiro
33
Coger el portante
12
Un paso en falso
24
A grito pelado
21
Bajar la guardia
32
Traer cola
17
Poner puertas al campo
21
A paso de tortuga
27
Tirarse los trastos a la cabeza
13
A pedir de boca
8
Caballo de batalla
26
Capear el temporal
9
Mean
26,5
Mean
18,5
(SD=8,4)
(SD=6,3)
Table 4. Overview of how many informants in the control group (n=39) were able to
correctly recall the sound-patterned idioms (SP items) and items containing no sound pattern
(NSP items) during the immediate test.
33
4.1.3 Delayed post-test control group
We have to bear in mind that from a didactic and applied linguistic perspective, the results of
delayed tests are more valid than the results of immediate tests in learning experiments. In the
immediate test of this study, the lexical phrases were still fresh in the informants’ memory since
it took place immediately after the participants had been asked to study the idioms. We call this
episodic memory (Tulving 1972). The results from the delayed post-test (one week later) are
deemed more valuable because they reflect recall from semantic memory. As stated by Tulving
(1972), items retained in the episodic memory are less permanent than items stored in the
semantic memory.
Table 5 shows that during the delayed post-test, the sound-patterned idioms (SP items) were, on
average, correctly recalled by 12,9 informants from the control group. The non-sound patterned
idioms (NSP items) on the other hand were, on average, correctly recalled by 6 informants from
the control group. In fact, the items containing a sound pattern were correctly recalled by twice as
much participants. A sign test showed the difference in mean scores to be significant at p < .004.
The fact that the items containing a sound pattern were better recalled in the absence of any
awareness-raising activity, points to the higher memorability of sound-patterned material.
34
SP items
Correctly
NSP items
Correctly
A troche y moche
recalled
4
A la primera de cambio
recalled
4
A trancas y barrancas
4
Hacer un brindis al sol
13
Ser corriente y moliente
13
Saltarse algo a la torera
7
El oro y el moro
23
Caja de pandora
17
De cabo a rabo
21
En camisa de once varas
3
Caer en la cuenta
16
Dar el pego
3
Con las manos en la masa
6
Dar la puntilla
2
El todo por el todo
22
Un toma y daca
6
Coger el toro por los cuernos
14
Viento en popa
4
Matar dos pájaros de un tiro
19
Coger el portante
2
Un paso en falso
10
A grito pelado
5
Bajar la guardia
18
Traer cola
6
Poner puertas al campo
8
A paso de tortuga
15
Tirarse los trastos a la cabeza
3
A pedir de boca
3
Caballo de batalla
12
Capear el temporal
1
Mean
12,9
Mean
6 (SD=5)
(SD=6,9)
Table 5. Overview of how many informants in the control group (n=32) were able to
correctly recall the sound-patterned idioms (SP items) and items containing no sound pattern
(NSP items) during the delayed post-test.
35
4.2 Comparison of the recall rates in the experimental and the control group
The second research question to be answered is whether awareness raising helps in unlocking the
mnemonic potential of sound patterns. In order to answer this question, the scores of two
different groups of participants are compared: one group was told to study the idioms but no
mention was made of the presence or memorability of sound patterns in the material (control
condition), another group was made aware of the presence of sound patterns before studying the
idioms and they were asked to indicate the sound patterns on their study sheet. It was decided to
calculate gain scores for both the experimental group and the control group. These scores were
obtained by subtracting the informants’ scores on the pre-test, which show how many phrases
they already knew beforehand, from their scores on the delayed post-test. This procedure allows
to measure the groups’ learning gain in the study.
Table 6 gives an overview of the control group’s and experimental group’s gain scores for all
phrases (TOTAL), the phrases containing a sound pattern (SP) and the phrases containing no
sound pattern (NSP) in the delayed post-test.
Results show that the gain scores from the experimental group and the control group are similar.
This means that the learning of idioms was equally successful in both participant groups: on
average they have both gained knowledge of more or less 6 idioms in this procedure. Awarenessraising seems to have had no effect whatsoever on the learning and recall of these new idioms.
When we look at the distribution of the learning gain across the two sets of materials (soundpatterned versus non sound-patterned), we observe again that sound-patterned idioms are twice as
easily retained when compared with the non-sound patterned idioms.
TOTAL (/30)
Gain scores
SP (/15)
NSP (/15)
6 (SD=5,5)
3,8 (SD=3,5)
2,2 (SD=2,4)
5,6 (SD=5,6)
3,6 (SD=3,5)
2 (SD=2,4)
experimental group
Gain scores
control group
Table 6. Gain scores of the control group and experimental group for all phrases (TOTAL), the
phrases containing a sound pattern (SP) and the phrases containing no sound pattern (NSP).
36
37
5. DISCUSSION
In this dissertation, two research questions are the focus of the study. Firstly, it is investigated
whether sound patterned idioms are recalled more easily by L2 learners than idioms containing
no sound pattern. Secondly, I looked into the effect of awareness raising on unlocking the
mnemonic potential of phonological patterns.
In order to answer the first research question, I looked into the results of the experimental group
and control group for the pre-test. Secondly, I took a closer look to the control group’s
performance on the immediate test and delayed post-test. Results show very clearly that the
answer to the first research question is positive. Sound patterned idioms were recalled more
easily by the informants than non-sound patterned idioms, which supports studies conducted by
Boers et al. (2012) and Eyckmans and Lindstromberg (2014).
Results from the pre-test point to the higher inherent memorability of sound patterned idioms
since these idioms were recalled more often by the informants than the non-sound patterned
idioms. Moreover, the control group better recalled the sound-patterned items during the
immediate test and the post-delayed test even though their awareness was not raised and their
attention was thus not directed towards the sound patterns. It is clear that idioms containing a
sound pattern are more salient to the learners.
This finding may however be partly attributed to the fact that our material was not balanced
enough. Even though I tried to balance the material in terms of length and frequency, there are a
few remarks to be made. First of all, certain idioms such as “a troche y moche”, “a trancas y
barrancas”, “ser corriente y moliente”, “el oro y el moro”, “de cabo a rabo” and “el todo por el
todo” showed interword overlap across more than one syllable. This might explain for instance
why the idiom “el oro y el moro” was most frequently recalled by the participants in the
immediate and delayed post-test. This phonological pattern is rare in English (e.g. trouble comes
double), but seems prevalent in Spanish. Presence of these items will surely have enhanced the
retention of the sound-patterned set of idioms.
38
For the second research question, the answer is negative. Awareness raising did not help in
unlocking the mnemonic potential of sound patterns. In order to answer this question, the gain
scores from the experimental and control group were compared. Alerting the informants to the
presence of phonological patterns is a specific form of structural elaboration. This should thus
have helped the students in recalling the items more easily as stated by Barcroft (2002).
Moreover, earlier research (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2005; Lindstromberg & Boers, 2008b, Boers
et al., 2012, 2014a, 2014b) showed that awareness raising is beneficial in unlocking the
mnemonic potential of sound patterns, since sound repetition may not be salient to all language
learners. Therefore, it was expected that awareness raising would indeed help in unlocking the
mnemonic potential. We did not find evidence to this effect.
As to why awareness raising did not help in unlocking the mnemonic potential, a few
explanations can be given. Firstly, this may have been due to the fact that the informants did not
succeed very well in indicating the sound patterns. Closer investigation of the informants’
performance on indicating the sound patterns revealed that, on average, the informants erred in
33% of the cases. The informants either indicated sound patterns where there were none,
indicated only one of both sound patterns or did not notice the sound pattern that was present.
Some phonological patterns, such as alliteration, seem to be recognised more easily by the
informants. Other phonological patterns however, such as assonance, were hardly ever noticed by
the informants. As discussed in Chapter 2.3.2.4 this may be because assonance is a less salient
sound pattern than alliteration (Lindstromberg and Boers, 2008b). Moreover, some students may
be more proficient in recognising sound patterns than others. This might depend on the students’
cognitive profile or it could be that auditory-oriented students are more susceptible to sound
patterns and can thus notice sound patterns more easily. This could be a promising area for
further research. Furthermore, the finding that awareness raising did not help to unlock the
mnemonic potential of the sound patterns could also be in line with a study conducted by
Eyckmans, Boers and Lindstromberg (2015) which shows that not all efforts to manipulate
learners’ processing during a memorisation task necessarily cause better results than if the
learners use their own mnemonic strategies.
39
Lastly, it is important to note that the results of the informants’ overall learning rate are rather
disappointing. After one week, informants roughly retain 20% of the idioms (i.e. 6 out of 30
idioms) to be learned (see Table 6). This meagre learning rate may be due to the fact that the
informants were exposed to too many target items at once. Normally, this kind of massed
vocabulary learning would not be advocated, but because of the experimental design, a lot of
target items needed to be included in order to avoid a ceiling effect in the test scores.
40
41
6. CONCLUSION
In this dissertation I tried to answer two main research questions by means of an experiment.
Firstly, I investigated whether sound patterned idioms are recalled more easily by L2 learners
than idioms containing no sound pattern. Secondly, I examined whether awareness may help in
unlocking the mnemonic potential of sound patterns.
Concerning the first research question, results show that the sound patterned idioms were recalled
more often by the informants, as was expected. The present research therefore supports earlier
assumptions (Boers et al. 2004a, 2004b) that alliteration and assonance have a mnemonic benefit
for the recall of L2 lexical phrases. In this dissertation however, other sound patterns, such as
rhyme, were looked into as well and turned out to have a mnemonic potential as well. Given that
lexical phrases are prone to phonological repetition, it is promising for L2 learners that this
phonological repetition seems to make those phrases easier to recall. It is important to bear in
mind however that some improvements could be made with regard to the material used for this
experiment as discussed in Chapter 5.
As to the second research question, against expectations, we did not find any evidence that
awareness raising would unlock the mnemonic potential of sound patterns. Results show that the
experimental group, whose awareness of the sound patterns was raised did not perform better
than the control group whose awareness was not raised. Earlier research (Boers & Lindstromberg,
2005; Lindstromberg & Boers, 2008b, Boers et al., 2012, 2014a, 2014b) is contradicted by this
finding. It was striking that the informants often erred in indicating the sound pattern which may
have influenced the effect of awareness raising. It is also important to note that some learners
might be more proficient in noticing and indicating sound patterns, depending on their cognitive
profile for instance. Moreover, as Eyckmans, Boers and Lindstromberg (2015) argue, it might be
that the informants would have performed better if they had used their own mnemonic strategies.
Lastly, it is important to point out the informants’ learning rate was meagre which may be due to
the experimental design. That is to say, learners were exposed to a large amount of vocabulary at
once, which would not be encouraged under normal learning circumstances.
42
In conclusion, sound-patterned idioms were recalled more easily by the informants, showing that
there is definitely a mnemonic potential. However, awareness raising did not help in unlocking
this mnemonic potential. When taking a closer look to the informants’ performance on indicating
the sound patterns, it was clear that they often failed in finding the sound pattern or in correctly
indicating it. Therefore, it can be concluded that there is definitely a mnemonic potential present
in Spanish but pedagogic instructions may lead to confusion. The learners who were involved in
my experiment clearly needed assistance to unlock the mnemonic potential and could not do this
autonomously.
43
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8. APPENDIX
8.1 Materials
48
8.2 Pre-test
49
50
8.3 Immediate test
51
52
8.4 Delayed post-test
53
54
8.5 Study Sheet
55
56
57
58
59