A review of the tip-of-the-tongue experience

“The feeling of not being able to access a piece of information is particularly palpable in “tip-of-the-tongue” states, as people tend to have an accurate assessment about whether they know something without being able to retrieve it in that moment.(11) How easily something is retrieved depends on a variety of factors,…”

“Because the feeling of knowing can emerge in the absence of recognition (e.g., in the tip-of-tongue effect; see Brown, 1991), it was expected that fewer notes would be necessary to judge the familiarity of a musical excerpt than to sing its continuation .”

“’’ Despite this retrieval failure, we often have a sense for the sound of the word, or the rhythm of its syllables, and we know its meaning (Brown & McNeill, 1966; Brown, 1991).”

“This view has been challenged by Brown and Watson (1987). Using multiple regression, they show that rated familiarity is significantly related not only to measures of spoken and written word frequency, but also word length and rated age of acquisition.”

“In addition, comparing training programs targeting different cognitive processes (inhibition, lexical-phonological association) could help resolve debates as to the primary causes of such errors ( Brown, 1991 ; Burke, McKay, Worthley, & Wade 1991 ).”

“However, this is not always the case, as sometimes we cannot find the word we are looking for—for example, when we are in the “tip-of-the-tongue”state (Brown, 1991;Brown & McNeill, 1966).”

“One explanation for TOTs is that they are caused by a more accessible but incorrect alternate word that comes to mind first and suppresses the target word, preventing its retrieval (e.g., Anderson & Bjork, 1994; Brown, 1991; Jones, 1989; Reason & Lucas, 1984; Schacter, 1999).”

“…ascribe forgetting to decay (J. Brown, 1958), interfernce (McGeoch, 1932; Müller & Pilzecker, 1900; Thorndike, 914), ineffective memory cues (A.S. Brown, 1991; Shiffrin, 970; Spear, 1971), or inhibition (Anderson, 2007; for an opposng view, see MacLeod, Dodd, Sheard, Wilson, & Bibi, 2003).”

“The TOT experience, a metacognitive monitoring state, appears to be brought about by a number of causes, and one cause is a momentary memory block (A. S. Brown, 1991; Smith, 1994a).”

“Brown, 1991; R. Brown & Mc-Neill, 1996); second, TOT states are associated with high recognition accuracy and with high rates of eventual retrieval (Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991).”

“, Burwitz, 1974; Healy, 1975; Murdock, 1962), and in the ‘‘tipof-the-tongue’’ state (Brown, 1991).”

“Another alternate explanation of the data from the first two experiments is that working memory load interfered with the retrieval of partial phonological information of the target answer, which is associated with higher TOT rates (see A. S. Brown, 1991; Gollan & Brown, 2006; S. M. Smith, 1994).”

“Routinely studied metacognitive and evaluative judgements such as Feelings of Knowing, Familiarity, Preference, Coherence and so on, which are considered by Mangan to be important examples of fringe consciousness, can be taken as one of these subcategories (Price, 2002).”

“All language users report occasional difficulty retrieving words they are sure they know (Brown, 1991; Brown & McNeill, 1966; Schwartz, 1999).”

“Brown, 1991; Reason & Lucas, 1984). To the rememberer, a TOT is a strong feeling that a particular target word can be retrieved, and the feeling that the retrieval of that target is imminent. All studies to date have shown that TOTs are correlated with objective indices of memory such as retrieval of the f irst letter…”

“Although the results of this experiment are supportive of a link between TOT states and curiosity, by the time the choices were made many, if not most, TOT experiences would probably already have subsided (see Brown & Croft, 2014). To overcome this problem, in the experiment that follows we asked participants whether…”

“TOT phenomenon has been shown to occur in healthy individuals, especially during aging or with the use of infrequent words.(18) This modality-independent representation is evidenced in bilingualism (and multilingualism): a person speaking about a spoon in one language will access the same mental representation as when…”

“Unfortunately, the weak points of testing are particularly problematic for FM patient samples who may be impaired for complex attention and normal for focal attention (2,3).”

“in terms of phenomenological experience of the rememberer (see Brown, 1991; Schwartz, 1999; Smith, 1994 for reviews). These researchers always collect selfreported TOTs from subjects. Recently, Bacon, Schwartz, Paire-Ficout, and Izaute (2006) refer to the inability to retrieve a known word as the Bcognitive TOT^ but r…”

“…since Brown and McNeill’s (1966) pioneering study, the approach has mostly given way to experimental research in which TOT states are induced in the laboratory by providing participants with definition (or picture) stimuli of low-frequency words (see Brown, 1991, and Schwartz, 2002, for reviews).”

“Brown, 1991; Smith, 1994, for reviews). Research has used the retrieval of target information to divide TOTs into substates. For example, Koriat and Lieblich (1974) divided TOTs into nine different substates, depending on whether the target was recognized or not recognized, whether it was recalled or not recalled, and…”

“common nouns (Cohen & Faulkner, 1986; Burke, MacKay, Worthley & Wade, 1991; see also Brown, 1991 ).”

“In many cases, speakers can report the Wrst sound of the target word and its number of syllables (see Brown, 1991, for review).”

“Lawless and Engen (1977) named this phenomenon the tip of the nose (TON) phenomenon, as an olfactory parallel to the more known tip of the tongue (TOT) experience (Brown, 1991; Schwartz, 2002).”

“The way in which a spontaneouslyrecognized word attracts attention and blocks processing of competitors may be likened to the way in which “blockers” hinder access to the desired word in word retrieval paradigms, notably in tip-of-thetongue states (see Brown, 1991, for a review of the tipof-the-tongue experience). The…”

“…acquisition; Fam, familiarity task; VC, visual complexity; A&F, results from Alario & Ferrand (1999); Kremin, results from Kremin et al. (2003). differentiate between tip-of-the-tongue and “don’t know” responses, since the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is more frequent in older people (Brown, 1991).”

“Regarding the question of temporal stages, studies by Schriefers, Meyer, and Levelt (1990) and van Turennout, Hagoort, and Brown (1997, 1998) provide evidence for an early activation of semantic but not phonological information, whereas at a later stage, activation of phonological but not semantic information was foun…”

“In the TOT state subjects typically know that there is a word, and often even its gender, the stress pattern or the number of syllables (Brown, 1991).”

“Perhaps the reason that very little attention has been given to gestures that occur during TOTs is because healthy speakers rarely experience them (Brown, 1991).”

“The review and book by Brown [ 1 , 2] shone the spotlight on deja vu and helped catalyze research output in the field.”

“In TOT states, speakers report a strong subjective sense of knowing the word, but they are unable to say it (Brown, 1991; Brown & McNeill, 1966).”

“However, we cannot rule out the possibility that consumers who had a vague feeling that they had innovated in some way were also the ones who agreed to participate in the personal interviews (similar to a “tip of the tongue” effect, Brown, 1991).”

“Whereas people experiencing a standard TOT state often have access to partial information about the target word itself, such as its first letter, what it sounds like, or its number of syllables (e.g., Brown, 1991; Rastle & Burke, 1996), people experiencing a so-called tip-of-the-nose state do not.”

“In most cases, when they failed to respond within 4,000 ms, the participants appeared to be caught in what we call a ‘tip-of-thepen’ state (a momentary failure to respond in producing the target character; cf. Brown & McNeil 1966; Brown 1991; Burke, MacKay, Wothley & Wade 1991).”

“The present results differ from those of Gollan and Brown (2006), who reported a positive effect of older age on phonological retrieval for difficult words but not for easy words, but which disappeared when the level of vocabulary was controlled.”

“A prime example involves tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states (e.g., Brown, 1991; Brown & McNeil, 1966), whereby people report having knowledge that is very close to being retrievable but is not currently accessible.”

“After the functional scan sessions, subjects very often reported that they experienced a feeling of imminence in the Hit-on trials, which is one of the characteristic features of the TOT state (Brown, 1991).”

“This has been supported by the studies showing that the tip of the tongue [77] and FOK states were associated with the retrieval of various types of information such as the initial letter of the missing word [32, 78] or the connotative meaning of this missing word [78-80].”

“through cues) [17, 18] and also recognition of spoken and written words [19, 20, 8].”

“One line of evidence for age-related difficulties in phonological encoding comes from the so-called tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon (see A. S. Brown, 1991; R. Brown & McNeill, 1966).”

“MacKay (1987) has suggested that one reason why older adults experience more retrieval difficulties, such as the tip-ofthe-tongue experience (see A. S. Brown, 1991, 2000), is that the linkages between the semantic and lexical representational systems weaken with age and disuse.”

“0 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9:1, pp. 160- I66 1987; Perfect & Hanley, 1992; Rubin, 1975; for reviews, see A. S. Brown, 1991; Smith, 1994).”

“stress patterns have come essentially from ‘‘tip of the tongue’’ studies (Brown, 1991), stress misplacement in slips of the tongue (Culter, 1980; Magno Caldognetto, Tonelli, & Panzeri, 1997), and from psycholinguistic priming studies (Meijer, 1994). However, the questions of how precisely lexical stress is stored, tha…”

“, 1991, 2004; James & Burke, 2000), and that older subjects often remember less information about the target word during ToT episodes than do younger subjects (Brown, 1991; Dahlgren, 1998).”

“Lawless and Engen (1977) first reported this phenomenon and found that it was both similar to and different from the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon found with words (Brown, 1991; Brown & McNeill, 1966).”

“…& Bolger, 1994; West & Stanovich, 1997); explicit studies of metacognitive judgments, such as feelings of knowing (e.g., Bless & Forgas, 2000; Brown, 1991; Nelson, 1984); and many general examinations of the nature of decision making under conditions of uncertainty, including those for which…”

“Similar support from the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is given by James (1890), Kozlowski (1977), Rubin (1975) and Elbers (1985) (all cited in Brown, 1991). In sum, from a psycholinguistic perspective, it is highly plausible that stem-level outputs are listed in their entirety, including their metrical structure. Cruc…”

“In fact, the idea that partial recollection may serve as an initial step in retrieving an item from memory has existed for quite some time (see A. S. Brown, 1991, for a review).”

“Also, the first letter of a word can often be produced when one is in a tip-of-the-tongue state (Brown, 1991; Lovelace, 1987), even though the full form cannot be retrieved.”

“They argued that the TOT state results from the interfering effect of "interlopers" or "blockers" that come to mind when one is attempting to search for the target, and that activations stemming from such compelling but wrong candidates must first be suppressed before the correct target itself can be retrieved (see Br…”

“FOK is usually distinguished from the related tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon in which recall is perceived as imminent (A. S. Brown, 1991; R. Brown & McNeill, 1966).”

“It is important to note that traditional statistical procedures could not be applied to these results because of the ‘‘fragmentary data problem’’ characteristic of studies on partial recall (see Brown, 1991; Brown & McNeill, 1966).”

“The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experimental paradigm, mainly used for studying speech errors in normally developing participants (for review, see Brown, 1991), was used to clarify the processes underlying the naming deficits observed in adolescents with dyslexia.”

“Perhaps the most famous example is the nearly universal tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience, where one feels very confident that one knows a word or name or other piece of information but cannot produce it (e.g., Brown & McNeil, 1966; see Brown, 1991 for a review).”

“They used a modified version of Brown and McNeill’s (1966) paradigm and presented a potential blocking word right after giving the definition of a rare word.”

“In a TOT experience, the speaker is able to provide semantic information about the word but is unable access the word’s phonological representation and direct the assembly of the spoken word (Brown, 1991; Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991; Levelt, 1999).”

“(1991) Experiment young < old Brown & Nix (1996) Experiment young < old Rastle & Burke (1996) Experiment 1 young < old Rastle & Burke (1996) Experiment 2 young < old only for proper names Dahlgren (1998) Experiment young = middle-aged < old Heine et al. (1999) Experiment young < young–old < old–old Heine et al.”

“Being in such a state generally creates a strong feeling of frustration, which is dramatically relieved when a person finally succeeds in producing the word or is told the correct answer (Brown, 1991).”

“comes from the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (Brown & McNeill, 1966; Brown, 1991; Vigliocco, Antonini, & Garrett, 1997), from studies of language impairment [Butterworth, 1989; see Garrett (1992) for an overview], and from experimental studies (Kempen & Huijbers, 1983; Levelt, Schriefers, Vorberg, Meyer, Pechmann, & Ha…”

“Brown & McNeill, 1966; A. S. Brown, 1991; Dell, 1984; Kohn et al., 1987; Koriat & Lieblich, 1974, 1975; MacKay, 1970; Rubin, 1975; Tweney & Zaruba, 1975), artificial grammar learning (e.g., Endress, Scholl, & Mehler, 2005; Endress & Mehler, 2010) and formal linguistics (e.g., McCarthy & Prince, 1993; Nespor & Vogel, 1…”

“…The organization of a signbased lexicon: evidence from tip-of-the-fingers A tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience refers to the state in which a speaker is temporarily unable to retrieve a word from memory, while being sure that he or she knows the word (see Brown, 1991; Schwartz, 1999 for reviews).”