Findings from 4 experiments with a total of 218 college students, in which the retention interval for second-language vocabulary words was treated as a between-subjects factor, indicate that long-term forgetting is greater for learners instructed to use the keyword mnemonic than for learners engaged in rote rehearsal. (SLD)

Assessing the effect of memory improvement strategies upon long-term forgetting, two studies investigated the influence of popular mnemonic devices (the keyword method and the "method of loci") upon forgetting relative to rote rehearsal. The first study (79 subjects) compared the forgetting of French vocabulary words learned either by…