I recognize your face but I can’t remember your name: Further evidence on the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

Yarmey, A. Daniel

doi:10.3758/bf03198110

Cited by 107 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Thus, these findings extend the results of previous studies that have elicited TOT states with either multisyllabicwords or proper nouns (see also Burke et al, 1991;Riefer, Keveri, & Kramer, 1995;S. M. Smith, Brown, & Balfour, 1991;Yarmey, 1973), and suggests the TOT state is most likely due to failures of a general lexical retrieval process rather than the failure of some special process used to retrieve unique or unusual words. Recall the relationships between word length and word frequency (Zipf, 1935), word length and neighborhood density (Bard & Shillcock, 1993;Pisoni et al, 1985), and word frequency and neighborhood density (Landauer & Streeter, 1973) for evidence that long, multisyllabic words are indeed unique and unusual.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

The facilitative influence of phonological similarity and neighborhood frequency in speech production in younger and older adults

2003

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A tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) elicitation task and a picture-naming task were used to examine the role of neighborhood frequency as well as word frequency and neighborhood density in speech production. As predicted for the younger adults in Experiment 1, more TOT states were elicited for words with low word frequency and with sparse neighborhoods. Contrary to predictions, neighborhood frequency did not significantly influence retrieval of the target word. For the older adults in Experiment 2, however, more TOT states were elicited for words with low neighborhood frequency. Furthermore, in Experiment 3, pictures with high neighborhood frequency were named more quickly and accurately than pictures with low neighborhood frequency. These results show that the number of neighbors and the frequency of those neighbors influence lexical retrieval in speech production. The facilitative nature of these factors is more parsimoniously accounted for by an interactive model rather than by a strictly feedforward model of speech production.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 76%

The facilitative influence of phonological similarity and neighborhood frequency in speech production in younger and older adults

2003

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“…Brown and McNeill (1966) and Koriat and Lieblich (1974) showed that during a TOT state, participants often had access to information about the number of syllables and the identity of the first and last letters of common nouns that they were trying to recall. Yarmey (1973) reported similar results for names of famous people; participants often knew the first letter and number of syllables when in a TOT state for a person's name. The present study investigated TOT states when participants were attempting to name famous people whose names contained two words (e.g., Liz Hurley and Gwyneth Paltrow) or three words (e.g., Jamie Lee Curtis and Olivia Newton John).…”

supporting

confidence: 63%

“…Instead, because information was probably available about the number of syllables in a person's name (Yarmey, 1973), the participants may have made their estimation of the number of words on the basis of the syllable length of the person's name. However, there was no significant correlation between the number of syllables in a name and the number of times that a name was considered to comprise three words by the participants who were in a TOT state.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Attempts to retrieve people's names are associated with large numbers of reported tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states (Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991;Yarmey, 1973;Young, Hay, & Ellis, 1985). In a TOT state, an individual is unable to retrieve a familiar word despite reporting that they know it and feel that its recall is imminent (see Schwartz, 2002, for a review).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Partial knowledge in a tip-of-the-tongue state about two- and three-word proper names

Hanley

Chapman

2008

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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Participants in this study attempted to name 44 famous people in response to reading biographical information about them. Half of the celebrities had names that contained two words (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow and Sean Penn), and half of them had names containing three words (e.g., Catherine Zeta Jones and Billy Bob Thornton). Half of the names had previously been judged to be of high familiarity (e.g., Gwyneth Paltrow), and half were of lower familiarity (e.g., Billy Bob Thornton). The results showed that when in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state, the participants were able to estimate at above-chance rates whether a celebrity's name comprised two or three words. Accurate information about the number of words was not available to the participants unless they were in a TOT state or had already named the person. Attempts to identify celebrities whose name had three elements were associated with an increased number of TOTs, relative to celebrities whose name had two units, but there was no difference in the number of don't know responses for names containing two or three words. Calculations based on Gollan and Brown (2006) suggested that having three names impaired the phonological but not the semantic stage of lexical retrieval, whereas low familiarity impaired both semantic and phonological retrieval stages.

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“…Consider the tip-of the-tongue phenomenon for example cf. Brown and McNeill (1966) and Yarmey (1973)' When a word is on the tip of the tongue, speakers can often specify how many syllables the word contains and which syllable receives primary stress-all without knowing what phonemes make up the syllables. The generic specification of words, as seen in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, favors a model with the same general characteristics as the Recoding Theory.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aspects of the Syntax of Behavior: Syllable Structure and Speech Rate

MacKay

1974

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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This paper shows that maximal rate of speech varies as a function of syllable struc ture. For example, eev syllables such as [sku] and eve syllables such as [kus] are produced faster than vee syllables such as [usk] when subjects repeat these syllables as fast as possible. Spectrographic analyses indicated that this difference in syllable duration was not confined to anyone portion of the syllables: the vowel, the consonants and even the interval between syllable repetitions was longer for vee syllables than for eve and eev syllables. These and other findings could not be explained in terms of word frequency, transition frequency of adjacent phonemes, or coarticulation between segments. Moreover, number of phonemes was a poor predictor of maximal rate for a wide variety of syllable strucrures, since vee strucrures such as [uIk] were produced slower than phonemically longer eeev structures such as [sklu], and V structures such as [a] were pr~duced no faster than phonemically longer ev structures such 11S ega]. These findings could not be explained by traditional models of speech production or articulatory difficulty but supported a complexity metric derived from a recently proposed theory of the serial production of syllables. This theory was also shown to be consistent with the special status of ev syllables suggested by Jakobson as well as certain aspects of speech errors, tongue-twisters and word games such as Doub.le Dutch.

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I recognize your face but I can’t remember your name: Further evidence on the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

Cited by 107 publications

References 3 publications

The facilitative influence of phonological similarity and neighborhood frequency in speech production in younger and older adults

The facilitative influence of phonological similarity and neighborhood frequency in speech production in younger and older adults

Partial knowledge in a tip-of-the-tongue state about two- and three-word proper names

Aspects of the Syntax of Behavior: Syllable Structure and Speech Rate

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