185 adult participants, ranging in age from 16 to 53 years, were given a list of 12 `foreign' and English word pairs to learn and then recall after a ten-minute delay. Following recall, participants reported their encoding strategies. The majority of participants reported using mnemonic strategies, and these participants correctly recalled more of the foreign words than those who did not report the use of mnemonic strategies. More importantly, more than half of the participants reported using the keyword method and they correctly recalled more of the foreign words than both those who did not use mnemonic strategies and those who used more general mnemonic strategies. This indicates that people spontaneously employ some formal mnemonic strategies, such as the keyword method, and they can do so effectively without specific training. As in previous studies, younger participants were also found to more likely use mnemonic strategies than those who were older.

Key words: spontaneous mnemonics, vocabulary learning, keyword method