Tip-of-the-Tongue Research

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon occurs during language production when an individual experiences problematic language production even though they are aware of and know the word or name they are attempting to produce. In that moment, language production fails and they are unable to produce the word or name they are targeting. This phenomenon results in a feeling as if the word/name is on the tip of the tongue (i.e., that production of the word or name is imminent) and is often associated with feelings of frustration.

This phenomenon has been studied in laboratory settings by presenting participants with word definitions (“What is the name of the hair spider with a painful but non-venomous bite?”) or photos of celebrities or otherwise famous individuals. These stimuli provide the participant with semantic information associated with the word or famous name of interest, however, often the syntactic information (i.e., linguistic elements or phonemes) needed for successful language production is lacking or missing completely.

As a research assistant during my bachelor’s (Saint Louis University) and master’s program (University of Colorado Colorado Springs) was heavily focused on the impact of psychosocial factors on language producation ability. For instance, in one study it was determined that increased levels of psychosocial stress led participants to report higher proportions of language production failures, qualified by tip-of-the-tongue occurrences. Later, it was demonstrated that participants who believed they were being observed during a language production task following a high-stress induction condition experienced greater degrees of language production failures.

The connected OSF page contains three posters and two publications. Posters were submitted to the American Psychological Association Conference (2013) and Psychonomic Society Conferences (2014; 2016). Publications concern experimental psychological research conducted at both Saint Louis University (James et al., 2017) and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (Schmank & James, 2019)