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

TOT States and Aging

The issue of TOT states is of particular importance to older adults, as TOT states become more frequent as we get older. Furthermore, older adults experience more negative consequences of TOT states, including the perception of incompetence by themselves or others and withdrawal from social interactions. Therefore, the need to resolve TOT states is even greater for older adults. Are they, like college students, influenced by encountering phonologically related words? Although few studies address this question, it seems that people in their 60s and early 70s get the same benefit from phonologically related words as younger adults. On average, however, people in their late 70s and 80s have significantly less or no TOT resolution following phonologically related words.

We have discovered that age can change the effects of grammatical-class selectivity in phonological cues. When my former graduate student Dunja L. Trunk (now a professor at Bloomfield College), Merrill and I compared TOT-resolution data from college students with those from adults aged 61-73 and 75-89, we found similar word-retrieval patterns in college students and people in their 60s and 70s. Thus, retrieval of bandanna improved after reading banish but not banjo. In contrast, adults in their late 70s and 80s did not benefit from reading banish, and furthermore, their retrieval of bandanna was worse after reading banjo compared with an unrelated word. In this age group, a phonologically related word actually makes TOT resolution harder when the words are in the same grammatical class. It seems that potential alternative words become more competitive for retrieval as we age, which has a real-world implication for TOT-resolution strategies. When having a TOT experience for the author of The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), asking for help could be counterproductive if the person suggests Thomas Hardy. Not only is the suggestion wrong, but it actually decreases the likelihood of TOT resolution for adults in their late 70s and 80s.