Neither Cue Familiarity nor Semantic Cues Increase the Likelihood of Repeating a Tip-of-the-Tongue State

Abstract

Psycholinguistic and metacognition researchers mostly disagree on what constitutes a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state. Psycholinguists argue that TOT states occur when there is a transmission of activation failure between the lemma and phonology levels of word production (e.g., Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991). Metacognition researchers argue that the TOT state is better described as a subjective experience caused by a mechanism that assesses the likelihood of recall from memory. One sub-hypothesis of the metacognitive account of TOT states is the cue familiarity hypothesis, which suggests that a TOT state may occur when cues elicit a feeling of familiarity (Metcalfe, Schwartz, & Joaquim, 1993). We conducted three experiments to evaluate the cue familiarity hypothesis of TOT state etiology. Experiment 1 included a test-retest TOT task with identical definitions (i.e., cues that should elicit familiarity) versus alternative definitions. TOTs were as likely to repeat for alternative definitions across test and retest as identical definitions, which is inconsistent with the cue familiarity hypothesis. Experiment 2 included the same task layout as Experiment 1, but we used very different cues (pictures versus descriptions for famous people). Again, we found that TOTs tended to repeat regardless of whether or not prompts were identical. In Experiment 3, we presented either a picture and description simultaneously or a description only on the first test, followed by a description only on retest. We found that giving participants an extra semantic cue did not change the probability of repeating a TOT state. These findings suggest that repeated TOT states do not occur due to cue familiarity nor is the locus of the TOT state at the semantic level of the word production/word recall system. Therefore, we argue that the results point towards a success of lemma access, but then failure of the lemma-to-phonology mappings.

On the tip of the pen: Effects of character-level lexical variables and handwriter-level individual differences on orthographic retrieval difficulties in Chinese handwriting

“…There is a significant effect of context word familiarity, with participants being less likely to experience TOP and amnesia if a character is embedded in a more familiar two-character word than a less familiar one. Such effect is consistent with the observation that cue familiarity enhances the feeling of knowing judgements (Schwartz & Metcalfe, 1992), and more importantly, consistent with the finding in character amnesia (Huang et al, in press), though it is inconsistent with the finding that, in a test–retest TOT task, cue familiarity between the two tests does not produce an effect (Oliver et al, 2019). In addition, such effect is also consistent with the observation that context helps to facilitate the spoken and handwritten production (Jescheniak et al, 2017; Shao & Rommers, 2020; R.…”

“…Findings regarding semantic effects on word form retrieval have been mixed. Oliver et al (2019) observed that additional semantic cues do not help to reduce TOT states. Based on this finding, they argued that speakers have full access to semantic representations in a TOT state but fail to retrieve the full word form as a result of broken links between lemma and phonology.…”

Socially Shared Feelings of Imminent Recall: More Tip-of-the-Tongue States Are Experienced in Small Groups

“…The metacognitive account of the TOT phenomenon (Schwartz, 1999(Schwartz, , 2002Schwartz and Metcalfe, 2011) has been challenged. In contrast to earlier work (Metcalfe et al, 1993;Schwartz, 2010), subsequent studies failed to support the view that TOT states may be caused by cue familiarity or cue-induced emotional arousal (D'Angelo and Humphreys, 2012;Oliver et al, 2019). Before considering group recall as a retrieval-independent TOTinducing factor, making a stringent, "double dissociation" case would be advisable.…”