In a repetition priming paradigm, young and older participants read aloud prime words that sometimes shared phonological components with a target word that answered a general knowledge question. In Experiment 1, prior processing of phonologically related words decreased tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) and increased correct responses to subsequent questions. In Experiment 2, the priming task occurred only when the participant could not answer the question. Processing phonologically related words increased correct recall, but only when the participant was in a TOT state. Phonological priming effects were age invariant, although older adults produced relatively more TOTs. Results support the transmission deficit model that the weak connections among phonological representations that cause TOTs are strengthened by production of phonologically related words. There was no evidence that phonologically related words block TOT targets.The tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT) is a relatively common type of speech error in which a word retrieval failure is coupled with a strong feeling of knowing and often with a considerable sense of frustration at the inaccessibility of the desired word. Typically, a person can access semantic and syntactic properties of the TOT word and partial phonological properties such as initial sound or number of syllables, although the complete phonology remains inaccessible (e.g., A. S. Brown, 1991;R. Brown & McNeill, 1966;Koriat & Lieblich, 1974;Miozzo & Caramazza, 1997;Vigliocco, Antonini, & Garrett, 1997). Resolution of a TOT is as compelling as the TOT onset when it occurs spontaneously, with the target word popping into mind at a time when retrieval attempts have been abandoned (Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991;A. S. Brown, 1991;Reason & Lucas, 1984). In this article, we investigate the phonological encoding processes that are fundamental to speech production and are implicated in the cause of TOTs and their spontaneous resolution. We also investigate the role of phonological encoding processes in aging effects. TOTs are a hallmark of old age, increasing in frequency with normal aging in both experimental and naturalistic studies (A. S. Brown & Nix, 1996; Lori E. James, Department of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University; Deborah M. Burke, Department of Psychology, Pomona College.Lori E. James is now at the Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles.This research was supported by a Haynes Fellowship and Grant R37 AGOS835 from the National Institute on Aging. Portions of this research were reported at the Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, GA, April 1994, and at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Los Angeles, CA, November 1995. We thank Jennifer Taylor for phonetic transcriptions and Kathryn Bock, Don MacKay, Alan Brown, Tim Perfect, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on a draft of this article.Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Deborah M. Burke, Department of Psychology, Pomona College, 550 Harvard Avenue, Claremont, Ca...

Older adults produced more off-topic speech (OTS) than younger adults during autobiographical interviews in previous studies, a finding attributed to age-related deficits in inhibiting irrelevant information. In this study, older adults produced more OTS than younger adults for autobiographical topics, but not for picture descriptions. A 2nd sample of younger and older participants rated older adults' story quality more positively than that of younger adults, a problematic finding for the inhibitory deficit explanation. Rater age affected ratings of how focused the speech was on the topic, suggesting age differences in criteria for OTS. These findings are consistent with the Pragmatic Change hypothesis, which maintains that older adults adopt communicative goals that emphasize the significance of life experiences rather than conciseness in their personal narratives.

Previous research testing age-related learning and memory problems specific to proper names has yielded mixed results. In the present experiments, young and older participants saw faces of previously unknown people identified by name and occupation. On subsequent presentations of each picture, participants attempted to recall the pictured person's name and occupation. Young and older adults made more name errors (the occupation was recalled but not the correct name) than occupation errors (the name was recalled but not the correct occupation), and older adults made relatively more name but not occupation errors than young adults. This specific age-related deficit in proper-name learning is explained within an interactive-activation model of memory and language that has been extensively applied to cognitive aging and proper-name retrieval.

This pilot study tested the efficacy of the My Disaster Recovery (MDR) website to decrease negative affect and increase coping self-efficacy. Fifty-six survivors of Hurricane Ike were recruited from a larger study being conducted at the University of Texas Medical Branch at the first anniversary of the storm. Restricted randomization was used to assign participants to the MDR website, an information-only website, or a usual care condition. Group × time interactions indicated that MDR reduced participant worry more than the other conditions. A similar trend was also identified for depression. Both websites were accessed a small to moderate amount and participants reported mixed satisfaction for both websites. Although the effect sizes for worry and depression were in the moderate to large range, small sample size and timing of the intervention qualify the findings. These preliminary findings encourage further evaluation of MDR with a larger, demographically diverse sample and indicate that the MDR website might be helpful in reducing worry and depression.

The psychometric properties of a Trauma Coping Self-Efficacy (CSE-T) scale that assesses general trauma-related coping self-efficacy perceptions were assessed. Measurement equivalence was assessed using several different samples: hospitalized trauma patients (n1 = 74, n2 = 69, n3 = 60), three samples of disaster survivors (n1 = 273, n2 = 227, n3 = 138), and trauma exposed college students (N = 242). This is the first multi-sample evaluation of the psychometric properties for a general trauma-related CSE measure. Results showed that a brief and parsimonious 9-item version of the CSE performed well across the samples with a robust factor structure; factor structure and factor loadings were similar across study samples. The 9-item scale CSE-T demonstrated measurement equivalence across samples indicating that the underlying concept of general post-traumatic CSE is organized in a similar manner in the different trauma-exposed groups. These results offer strong support for cross-event construct validity of the CSE-T scale. Associations of the CSE-T with important expected covariates showed significant evidence for convergent validity. Finally, discriminant validity was also supported. Replication of the factor structure, internal reliability, and other evidence for construct validity is a critical next step for future research.