Tip-of-the-tongue
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P55
2025-11-01
61
Tip-of-the-tongue
It might seem odd that words need to be constructed, rather than simply read out of the mental dictionary as complete forms. But there is some fairly compelling evidence that accessing a word from the dictionary is not an all-or-nothing experience. One source of such evidence is the tip-of-the-tongue TOT phenomenon, which was described over a century ago as experiencing a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term’ James, 1893 243. What is intriguing is that when a speaker has a TOT experience, their sense of closeness’ means that they can often correctly identify some elements of the word they are looking for such as its beginning sounds, or its stress pattern, and they can often identify other similar-sounding words. They just seem unable to put together the complete form of the word.
Researchers have conducted experimental studies of word-form access by inducing TOT states. For instance, Brown and McNeill 1966 gave participants definitions of uncommon English words, and asked them to give the word corresponding to each definition. If they could not give the word, they were asked to recall as much as they could about it. Participants were good at recalling the beginnings around 70 correct and ends of words, but not as accurate with the middle portions. They could also recall the number of syllables again around 70 correct and the position of stressed syllables in polysyllabic words. Better memory for the beginnings of words ties in well with the finding that word beginnings are important for finding words in the mental lexicon during comprehension. The finding that word endings are also recalled better than the middles of words could reflect the important role of suffixes in English as markers of grammatical information and word class.
Vigliocco and colleagues 1997 ran a similar study with native speakers of Italian, which has grammatical gender i.e. nouns are either masculine or feminine. They chose target words where the gender was arbitrary, i.e. they avoided examples like a and o a where there would be a semantic reason why a word should be masculine or feminine, and they avoided words where a particular ending indicates the gender of the word, such as amico male friend vs amica female friend. They found that participants in a TOT state could successfully report the gender of the target word 84 of the time, and their ability to report the gender was independent of whether they could report anything about the sound shape of the word. This last finding supports the idea of the two-stage process of lexicalisation – grammatical information linked to the lemma is available separately from phonological information linked to the lexeme.
Many brain-damaged patients have an experience similar to TOT, called anomia, but for them this happens much more frequently. It has been argued that the TOT experience is really just a special instance of the normal word-building processes, and that word building always involves filling out the details of a word-sketch that has become available during the word-finding stage. Filling out the word-sketch becomes a more obvious process in TOT experiences, because some aspects of the word are for some reason not available to the speaker. The idea that there is a word sketch that needs to be filled out with the appropriate components is a parallel to the observation in Chapter 2 that there is a sketch of a sentence that needs to be filled out with the appropriate words.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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