Everybody knows this feeling: you are looking for a specific word. It is floating in your mind but you can not grab it. You know what it means, are able to recall synonyms. Sometimes you also have a clue how it sounds like… the initial letter, the syllable length. Although you are not able to immediately find the right word you are looking for you know immediately if a word somebody else suggests is the one you are looking for or if it’s not. This mental state in which you can’t recall a familiar word but words of similar form and meaning is called "tip of the tongue" (TOT) phenomenon. In 1966 Roger Brown and David McNeill published a paper in which they tried to analyze the TOT phenomenon. They read the definition of uncommon English words to fifty-six Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates and asked them to recall the word fitting to the definition before reading the target word. Sometimes this procedures created TOT states in single subjects were the person was aware of a word (right or wrong) fitting to the definition. In this case they asked the person to write down what he knows about the word: initial letter, number of syllables, words with similar meaning or words with similar sound. EXAMPLE The process of recalling parts and attributes of a word but not the complete word itself is called "generic recall". The study showed that indeed people in the TOT state can recall with significant success the number of syllables and the initial letter in a target word. Words with similar sound were most likely representing the right letters in the right position in the beginning and the end of the word, supporting the known order of attention in word reading: As long as the first and the last letter are in the right position people are most likely able to read the word even if the other letters in the middle of the word are unsorted. Looking at the “sound like” words which the persons listed up in the TOT state showed that there was a correlation between the similarity of the “sound like” words to the target words and the chance to find the target word on its own. Roger Brown and David McNeill explain this fact by describing the word memory as a keysort cards system. Each word we know is described by cards describing various features of the word. The cards are punched for various features of the words they describe. Therefore, even if the card with the target word is missing some letters or is unreadable, we are able to recall some facts about the word which then can help us to fill the gaps in the target card until we find the word. The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon
Roger Brown and David McNeill Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior 5.4 (1966): 325-337
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