AICE Language Lexis Practice Exam

Repetition of vowel sounds within nearby words is assonance. It creates a musical, lilting effect by echoing vowels rather than consonants, linking words together through sound. A classic example is the phrase “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain,” where the long “a” sound recurs across different words and helps unify the line’s rhythm.

This differs from alliteration, which repeats initial consonant sounds at the beginnings of words (like “Peter Piper”), not the vowels. It also differs from rhyme, which pairs sounds at the ends of lines or phrases, and from onomatopoeia, which uses words that imitate actual sounds (buzz, hiss, splash). So the device described is assonance.