FEATURE ARTICLE
Tip-of-the-Tongue States Yield Language Insights
Probing the recall of those missing words provides a glimpse of how we turn thoughts into speech and how this process changes with age
Lise Abrams
Phonology Is Everywhere
It seems reasonable to expect that we can encounter the TOT word's phonology in more ways than the ones observed in the lab. Since I began studying this phenomenon, I've tried to analyze my own experiences with TOT states. I've found that most of the time when I resolve a TOT state, I don't know which word triggered it. This observation led me to wonder whether there are hidden ways of coming across phonological cues, ones that aren't as obvious as hearing or saying the first-syllable phonology.
Another former graduate student, Lisa A. Merrill, and I explored this question using a similar TOT-inducing slate of general-knowledge questions. However, this time, rather than giving the tongue-tied participants a list of words, we showed them a picture of some object and asked them to name it. Half of the time, these pictures had two possible names, and the less common name contained the target's first syllable. For example, for the target biopsy, one of the pictures could be labeled as either motorcycle or bike, where bike is the less-used name. The other half of the time, the picture name was unambiguous and had no phonological relationship to the target (helicopter, for example).
We discovered that people were more likely to resolve a TOT state for the word biopsy after saying the word motorcycle rather than helicopter. Why does motorcycle help, since it has no direct phonological overlap with biopsy? We think the reason is that motorcycle is strongly related in meaning to bike, which has a phonological connection with the target. Thus, even second-hand exposure to the first syllable of the TOT word, mediated by semantic connections, can help to resolve TOT states. It's not necessary to actually encounter or produce that phonology directly. Given the frequency of pop-ups in everyday life and the fact that most of them have no obvious link to recently encountered words, we believe that many TOT states resolve through this kind of mediated exposure to the target phonology.
Although many studies have validated the idea that words with phonologies similar to the target help to resolve TOT states, there is a caveat: In some cases, phonologically related words actually impede the retrieval of a target word. Burke and her colleagues showed that when TOT states are accompanied by an alternative word—a word that you know is not the right one—TOT states are less likely to be resolved. They also noted that these alternatives were often phonologically related and the same part of speech as the TOT word. Other speech-production studies also show that wrong answers are usually in the same grammatical class as the intended word—for example, saying "cool tart" instead of "tool cart." Both are adjective-noun phrases. We suspected that this pattern of preserving grammatical class when retrieving the wrong word might be significant for determining when phonologically related words help or hurt our resolution of TOT states.
In 2005, then-undergraduate Emily L. Rodriguez and I set out to test this idea. We again induced TOT states with general-knowledge questions, such as "What do you call a large, colored handkerchief usually worn around the neck or head?" The target word in this example is bandanna, a noun. When people experienced a TOT state, we asked them to read silently one of three possible word lists. One list contained a word with the same first syllable as the target and of the same grammatical class, like banjo (a noun). The second list included a word with the same first syllable but representing a different part of speech, like banish (a verb). The third list lacked phonologically related words. The participants then saw the question again and attempted to retrieve the target.
We discovered that the only cue words that were helpful were the ones from a different part of speech. Reading banish (a verb) helped resolve a TOT state for bandanna (a noun), but reading banjo (a noun) did not. These findings suggest that similar-sounding words in the same grammatical class as the TOT word may compete with the TOT word for production, rather than helping to produce it.
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