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On the role of the syllable in tip-of-the-tongue states

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Nina Jeanette Hofferberth at Goethe University Frankfurt
Nina Jeanette Hofferberth
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Abstract

The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon is a type of production failure during phonological encoding. A reaction-time experiment was performed to determine whether the right first syllable of the target facilitates TOT resolution and whether another first syllable inhibits TOT resolution. The syllables were presented individu-ally, which means not in another word related to the target in order to avoid inter-lopers. It seems that the right first syllable facilitates a positive TOT resolution, while a wrong first syllable has an inhibiting effect. These results indicate that the presentation of the right first syllable of the target word strengthens the weakened phonological connections that cause TOTs and facilitates word retrieval.
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Proceedings of the International Conference of Experimental Linguistics
ExLing 2012, 27-29 August 2012, Athens, Greece.
On the role of the syllable in tip-of-the-tongue
states
Nina Jeanette Hofferberth
Department of Linguistics, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany
Abstract
The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon is a type of production failure during
phonological encoding. A reaction-time experiment was performed to determine
whether the right first syllable of the target facilitates TOT resolution and whether
another first syllable inhibits TOT resolution. The syllables were presented individu-
ally, which means not in another word related to the target in order to avoid inter-
lopers. It seems that the right first syllable facilitates a positive TOT resolution,
while a wrong first syllable has an inhibiting effect. These results indicate that the
presentation of the right first syllable of the target word strengthens the weakened
phonological connections that cause TOTs and facilitates word retrieval.
Key words: speech production, lexical retrieval, word finding failures, phonological
cue, first syllable
Theoretical background
The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon refers to the experience when a
well-known or familiar word cannot immediately be recalled but “recall is
felt to be imminent” (Brown & McNeill 1966: 325). In the absence of actual
retrieval, various aspects of the inaccessible target word are still frequently
available, such as first phoneme or letter, first syllable and number of sylla-
bles. The recovered partial information can consist of competing items that
resemble the target word phonologically and/or semantically and could give
rise to competition or conflict during attempts to resolve the TOT. These
words that often come to mind while experiencing a TOT and can hamper
TOT resolution are so-called “interlopers”.
Successful lexical retrieval in a TOT state can be imminent (within
minutes) or delayed (after some hours or days) and may occur spontaneously
(so-called “pop-ups”). TOT resolution may be achieved through external
search strategies (such as looking up the word in a dictionary or by asking
someone) or through internal strategies (such as searching in the alphabet or
generating similar words). Laboratory studies often involve cueing proce-
dures with a cue-target relationship that is not readily obvious, yet efficient
to boost activation of the target word and assist TOT resolution.
Experiments by James & Burke (2000) demonstrated that phonologically
related cues boost activation of the target word. Abrams and colleagues fol-
N. J. Hofferberth
Proceedings of the International Conference of Experimental Linguistics
ExLing 2012, 27-29 August 2012, Athens, Greece.
2
lowed up James & Burke and showed that it is the first syllable of the target
(presented in a cue word), which leads to significantly more TOT resolu-
tions, compared to the middle and last syllable (White & Abrams 2002).
Abrams et al. (2003, Experiment 2) demonstrated that TOT resolution re-
quires the entire first syllable and not only the first letter and, furthermore
(Experiment 3), that the first syllable (presented in a cue word) significantly
improves TOT resolution over the first phoneme – but only when the partic-
ipants read the cue words silently. Thus, TOT resolution was facilitated by
activating the initial syllable via related words sharing that feature.
Aim and scope
In the present study, a reaction-time experiment was performed to determine
whether the right first syllable of the target facilitates TOT resolution and
whether another first syllable with matched frequency inhibits TOT resolu-
tion. The syllables were presented individually, which means not in another
word to avoid providing any semantic information of the target and to avoid
interlopers. In contrast to the studies of Abrams et al. (2003), the cue did not
consist of a related word that shared the same first syllable as the target but
only consisted of the first syllable alone.
Experimental Methodology
Participants
The participants in this experiment were ten undergraduates at Heinrich-
Heine-University in Dusseldorf who were paid for their services. All stu-
dents (7 female, 3 male) were native speakers of German and between 22
and 30 years old (mean: 25.5 years).
Stimuli
138 German nouns were presented to induce TOTs. The frequencies of the
whole words were taken from DLEX database and the frequencies of the
first syllables of these nouns were accessed from the CELEX database
(Baayen, Piepenbrock & Rijn 1993).
Procedure
Participants read 138 definition-like questions on a computer screen and
pushed a button to indicate “know”, “don't know” or, “TOT”, respectively.
When in a TOT state, a written cue was presented. This was either the right
On the role of the syllable in tip-of-the-tongue states
Proceedings of the International Conference of Experimental Linguistics
ExLing 2012, 27-29 August 2012, Athens, Greece.
3
first syllable, a wrong syllable with the same CV structure and matched fre-
quency as the fitting syllable, or a neutral baseline condition XXX.
Results
Of the 138 stimuli, 14 stimuli did not induce TOTs at all. These 14 words
were middle- or high-frequent and 50% had a CVC syllable structure, 42.9%
a CV structure and 7.1% a VC structure. Of the 124 stimuli that induced
TOTs, the most frequent syllable structure was CV (58.1%), then CVC
(16.9%), VC (15.3%), CCV (7.3%) and CCVC (2.4%). Furthermore, 58.9%
of these were middle-frequent, 33.8% high-frequent, 6.5% low-frequent, and
0.8% without indication from the database.
The TOT rate was 20.6% (=284 TOTs, at average 28 TOTs per per-
son). After the cue was presented, 15.5% of the TOTs could be resolved in
the given time of 10 seconds. Of the resolved TOTs, 68.2% were positive
TOTs (answer was consistent with target) and 31.8% were negative TOTs
(answer differed from target).
With the right first syllable, TOTs were positively resolved more of-
ten (19.8%) in comparison to the control condition (7.5%). With a wrong
first syllable, TOTs were positively resolved less (4.3%) in comparison to
the control condition (7.5%).
Discussion and conclusion
Tip-of-the-tongue states are an important source of information concerning
the nature of the processes and architecture of the speech production system.
TOTs are a unique type of production failure, a breakdown during phonolog-
ical encoding (cf. Levelt 1989).
TOTs occur about once a week in everyday life and on between 10-
20% of lab stimuli (cf. Brown 2012: 195). In the present study, the TOT rate
was 20.6%. With the right first syllable, TOTs were positively resolved more
often in comparison to the control condition. With a wrong first syllable,
TOTs were positively resolved less in comparison to the control condition. It
seems that the right first syllable facilitates a positive TOT resolution, while
a wrong first syllable has an inhibiting effect. These results indicate that the
presentation of the right first syllable of the target word – presented individ-
ually and not in a cue word – strengthens the weakened phonological con-
nections that cause TOTs and facilitates word retrieval.
Only 15.5% of the TOTs could be resolved in the given time of 10
seconds while the remaining 84.5% TOTs stayed unresolved. It needs to be
discussed if the time span should be longer in order to get more resolved
TOTs but then it would be unclear if the participants used other search strat-
N. J. Hofferberth
Proceedings of the International Conference of Experimental Linguistics
ExLing 2012, 27-29 August 2012, Athens, Greece.
4
egies (such as the semantic one via associations and co-hyponyms) and the
syllable cue was not used.
Another reaction-time experiment is currently being run in order to
investigate further how the first syllables of the targets, syllable frequencies,
and number of cohort words with the same first syllable influence TOT inci-
dence and TOT resolution.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Prof. Dr. Helen Leuniner (Goethe-University Frankfurt) for
her support and much inspiring discussion, and Frauke Hellwig (Heinrich-
Heine-University Dusseldorf) for her help in experiment preparation and
programming.
References
Abrams, L., White, K.K. and Eitel, S.L. 2003. Isolating phonological components
that increase tip-of-the-tongue resolution. Memory & Cognition 31, 1153-
1162.
Brown, A.S. 2012. The tip of the tongue state. New York, Psychology Press.
Brown, R. and McNeill, D. 1966. The ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon. Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 5, 325-337.
James, L. and Burke, D.M. 2000. Phonological priming effects on word retrieval and
tip-of-the-tongue experiences in young and older adults. Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition 26, 1378-1391.
Levelt, W.J.M. 1989. Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA,
MIT Press.
Meyer, A.S. and Bock, K. 1992. The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: Blocking or
partial activation? Memory & Cognition 20, 715-726.
White, K.K. and Abrams, L. 2002. Does priming specific syllables during tip-of-the-
tongue states facilitate word retrieval in older adults? Psychology and Aging
17, 226-235.
Databases
CELEX: Baayen, R.H., Piepenbrock, R. and Rijn, H. 1993. The CELEX lexical
database (CD-ROM). Philadelphia, PA, Linguistic Data Consortium, Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania.
DLEX: http://dlexdb.de
... In the pre-tests, definitions had been collected and verified (Hofferberth, 2011). In two pilot studies (Hofferberth 2012), the design of the experiment was evaluated, and more definitions were collected and validated. Thereafter, two experiments were performed. ...
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... In the pre-tests, definitions had been collected and verified (Hofferberth, 2011). In two pilot studies (Hofferberth 2012), the design of the experiment was evaluated, and more definitions were collected and validated. Thereafter, two experiments were performed. ...
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