Prior research indicates that adults rely on different mnemonic strategies depending on the memory task instructions (e.g. free recall vs. immediate serial recall vs. complex working memory span). However, it is less clear whether adults are similarly sensitive to the stimulus content of a specific task. Given the common use of immediate serial recall in educational and clinical settings, understanding strategy use on this task could account for both individual differences on any one test as well as reliability estimates across multiple tests which use subtly different stimuli. The current study describes participants’ strategy use across lists of phonologically similar (e.g. mat, man, ran, rat, pat, pan) or phonologically distinct (e.g. clock, spoon, hand, bus, door, fish) words. Regardless of whether list type was manipulated between group (Experiment 1) or within-participants (Experiment 2), adults reported consistent use of phonological strategies (e.g. rehearsal). Notably, though, participants reported increased reliance on the non-phonological strategies of mental imagery and sentence generation when remembering phonologically similar words. The exception to this finding was when participants first completed a block of serial recall with phonologically distinct words (Experiment 2). Taken together, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that adults spontaneously shift strategies in response to the specific memorandum, but once an effective strategy is in use, they stick with that strategy despite a change in memoranda **Published Communication.** This manuscript can be found in Memory & Cognition (doi: 0.3758/s13421-023-01418-2; link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-023-01418-2) **Data Citation.** See citation list in the top-right corner of the main project page. This OSF project contains the data and analysis script the experiment in our paper. If you would like to use the data in future published work, please cite both the paper and this OSF project. **Ethics Approval.** This project was approved by the Institutional Review Board at under IRB # (PI:). **Contact.** For any further questions or comments, please email angela.aubuchon@boystown.org