ON THE TIP OF THE TONGUE - WHAT CAUSES WORD FINDING FAILURES IN YOUNG AND OLDER ADULTS

This paper develops a new theory of the tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon. Within this interactive activation model of speech production, TOTs occur when the connections between lexical and phonological nodes become weakened due to infrequent use, nonrecent use, and aging, causing a reduction in the transmission of priming. Predictions of the theory were examined using retrospective questionnaires, diary procedures, and a laboratory word retrieval task. In Study 1, young, midage, and older adults recorded naturally occurring TOTs in structured diaries during a four week interval in their everyday life. TOT targets were infrequent words in the language, and proper names, the largest category of TOT targets, were the names of acquaintances who had not been contacted recently, especially for older adults. Persistent alternates, i.e., incorrect words that came repeatedly to mind, shared phonology and grammatical class with TOT targets, and delayed TOT resolution. Older adults experienced more TOTs, but fewer persistent alternates. An influence of expectations on these age differences was ruled out by responses to the retrospective questionnaires, which indicated no age differences in expected number of TOTs. In Study 2, the basic results for age and persistent alternates were replicated in the laboratory for experimenter-selected TOT targets. The experimental study also demonstrated that proper names of famous people are especially vulnerable to TOTs in older adults. © 1991.