On the Tip of the Tongue

In other blogs, I’ve written about how speech disorders, production errors, and hesitation phenomena provide information on what happens in our minds when we are speaking. But linguist Paul Georg Meyer claims that “the most revealing errors…are the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.”

The TOT (tip-of-the-tongue) state is one familiar to everyone; it’s when we can’t seem to find a particular word that seems just out of our reach. We more or less know the word we want to say, but can’t bring it all the way to consciousness. Linguistics Harley and Brown describe the phenomenon as a moment when a person has been able to successfully access the abstract lemma* through semantic specification, and yet is unable to access the corresponding phonological word form.

It’s easy to induce this phenomenon artificially, which allows linguists to analyze our struggle for the right word. What the experiments showed is that people’s ability to recall specific words improved when they were provided with phonologically related words. Based on their experiments, researchers James and Burke theorized that language retrieval depends on memory of both a word’s meaning and its sound. Their Transmission Deficit Model they created based upon their research states that language production “depends on the strength of connections within a network that includes conceptual and phonological levels.” The theory suggests that TOTs occur when semantic, but not phonological nodes, receive adequate activation. That is, we may know the exact meaning, but if we can’t recall the sound, we cannot articulate—or even think of—the word.

This idea is more revolutionary than it may sound. For years, the traditional idea was that TOTs arose because words with similar sounds actually blocked the target word from coming through. This is more intuitive to us because it matches our experience of what TOTs feel like. Whenever I can’t think of a word, there’s always another word that repeatedly keeps coming to mind instead; it definitely feels as though this alternate word is preventing me from being able to attain my target word!

Because TOTs are generally induced by definitions of low-frequency words, it suggests that there is insufficient consolidation of the memory; the word has not been used often enough for our brain to store it within easy reach. The disuse of a word, then, seems to cause a weaker connection between its phonological and semantic forms (since we are relieved from the TOT state only when we are prompted with similar sounding words; the external prompting internally rebuilds that connection), and thus a lesser facility for language. Lera’s idea that language is not inherently instinctive—it is only our ability to learn language that is inherent—fits in with all of this; language is something we have the potential to learn and make better, but also something that is damaged by disuse.

* Lemma signifies the "headword" (or "citation form") of an entry in a glossary (for example, the lemma go consists of go together with goes, going, went, and gone)

Oh, and just something random and interesting: based on the theory that TOTs occur when phonological modes do not receive adequate activation, as well as the fact that depression affects cognition in terms of net reduction in cognitive processing resources, researchers conducted an experiment to test whether depressed people experience more TOT’s, reasoning that depressives would be more likely to experience inadequate activation of phonological modes. Their conclusion? Depressed individuals do, in fact, experience more TOT’s.

http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/speech-errors.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=I2hXL8WClNUC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254&dq=tip+of+the+tongue+phenom+linguistic&source=web&ots=KQVww7-ITp&sig=rBkcbzbly9uGrhUob-lCvHDQGmo

http://www.apa.org/releases/tot.html

http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov00/sw.html

http://arxiv.org/html/cs.CL/0103002

http://www.puc.edu/Faculty/Aubyn_Fulton/fulton/research/tot97.htm