A number of factors may affect the strength of a keyword mnemonic. One that’s often suggested is whether or not the mnemonic is supplied to the student, or thought up by them.
Intuitively, a mnemonic you’ve thought up yourself will be stronger than one that is given to you.
One study that compared the effectiveness of keywords provided versus keywords that are self-generated, found that participants who were required to make up their own keywords performed much worse than those who were given keywords.
This doesn’t answer the question of the relative durability, but it does point to how much more difficult the task of generating keywords is. This has been confirmed in other studies.
The quality of the keyword mnemonic may affect its durability.
Mnemonics that emphasize distinctiveness, that increase the vividness and concreteness of the word to be learned, are remembered less well over time than mnemonics that emphasize relational and semantic information (which is why the emphasis in recent times is on making interactive images or sentences, in which the keyword and definition interact in some way).
Having bizarre images seems to help remembering immediately after learning (when there is a mix of bizarre and less unusual images), but doesn’t seem to help particularly over the long term.
The advantage of a semantic connection may be seen in the following example, taken from an experimental study.
Students who were told to use their own methods to remember almost all used a keyword-type technique to learn some items. Unlike those in the keyword group, the keywords chosen by these subjects typically had some semantic connection as well.
Thus, for the Spanish word “pestana”, meaning eyelash, several people used the phrase “paste on” as a link, reflecting an existing association (pasting on false eyelashes).
The keyword supplied to the keyword group, on the other hand, was pest, which has no obvious connection to eyelash.
It has been suggested that keywords that are semantically as well as acoustically related to the word to be learned might prove more durable, which makes it easier to remember.
