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

Abstract

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.

Partial word knowledge in the absence of recall

“…Our modest evidence indicates that perhaps a general (long/short), rather than specific (syllable number), sense of word length may be accessible for some higher-confidence unrecalled words. Such modest evidence is comparable to Hanley and Chapman's (2008) finding that accuracy in identifying word number in unretrieved celebrity names (two words, Gwyneth Paltrow; three words, Billy Bob Thornton) was only 7 % higher during TOTs (56 %) than during DKs (49 %). Interestingly, their DK performance was clearly at chance, similar to our UF and LF items in Experiment 2.…”

Why are names of people associated with so many phonological retrieval failures?

“…There is no evidence that using biographical descriptions should have any effect on the number of phonological retrieval failures for people's names. For example, Hanley and Chapman (2008) reported broadly similar TOT rates to those observed in Experiment 1 when participants were asked to identify celebrities from verbal descriptions.…”

“…Gollan and Brown (2006) showed that retrieval failure for phonological information about known items was more probable for common names of relatively low familiarity. Hanley and Chapman (2008) showed that the same is true for the names of people. This raises the possibility that common names would induce as many retrieval failures as people's names if the two were matched for preexperimental familiarity.…”

The psychology of intelligence analysis: Drivers of prediction accuracy in world politics.

“…Future research should examine whether participants use the TOT heuristic to infer other qualities and characteristics of the unretrieved target, such as the number of words in an unretrieved name (e.g., Hanley & Chapman, 2008), a word's length, or the likelihood that the word starts with a more versus a less frequent first letter or sound. Given the proposed role of partial attribute access in other metacognitive states, such as feelings-of-knowing (e.g., Nomi & Cleary, 2012), future studies should also examine whether similar heuristics are used with such other states.…”