PSY7010-B                                                                             22023833

Sounds-Do they help or hinder? An investigation of two models from Direct-access theory of Tip of Tongue phenomenon

Abstract

The aim of this study was to check weather Tip of Tongue (TOT) phenomenon could be explained by the Transmission Deficit (TD) Hypothesis vs the Blocking Hypothesis (BH). A Prime-Picture experiment was done using Gorilla software. The participants (N=85) were sorted into three groups-one group saw phonological prime words before pictures, another group saw semantic prime words preceding the pictures and the control group saw prime words that were neither semantically not phonologically related to the pictures. It was hypothesised that mean number of TOTs will be lesser in phonological prime condition than in Semantic or Control conditions. It was found that the results supported the hypothesis strengthening the evidence for TD model of TOT.

Introduction

Language production is nothing short of a marvel. It involves two distinct stages-the first one is the lemma retrieval stage and the second one is the word-form encoding stage. Abstract words that have syntactic and semantic but not phonological information of the word are called lemmas. Phonological information of the word including the morphemes and phonemes, on the other hand is the word-form (Eysenck & Keane, 2010).

This differentiation if further elucidated by the Tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOTs). TOTs are an experience of feeling of knowledge of the word, but a failure of retrieval. There are two distinct, but important aspects of TOT as suggested by -Inaccessibility and Imminence. There are many approaches or views of TOT including the Psycholinguistic view, the Memory view, and the Metacognitive view. For this study, Psycholinguistic view is explored and two of the direct access theories are investigated.

One of the two Direct Access theories investigated in this study is the Transmission Deficit (TD) Hypothesis (Burke et al., 1991). This model explains TOTs as the deficit in transmission of activation of nodes. The Syntactic and semantic nodes are activated but there is deficit in transmission of activation and connection in the phonological nodes or the word form stage. Thus, this model then implies that phonological primes should facilitate recall and less number of TOTs should occur. (Schwartz, 1999)

The other theory is the Blocking Hypothesis (BH). It explains TOTs as a function of other related words that are retrieved by the person but are identified as incorrect. These related words are considered to hinder the correct response thus eliciting a TOT. According to this model, Phonological primes should get in the way of the correct response and thus more TOTs should be elicited. (Schwartz, 1999)

The aim of this study was to examine the Transmission Deficit Hypothesis of TOTs versus the Blocking Hypothesis of TOT. It was done using a Prime-Picture task. Priming refers to the impact that experience or events of the past have on current behaviour, decisions, and performance which the primed person is unaware of. (Schacter & Buckner, 1998).

There has been more evidence for TD than for BH. Thus, based on previous research, it was hypothesised that Phonological primes would facilitate recall and thus lesser mean number of TOTs will be recorded as compared to the Semantic Prime and Control condition. Thus, we hypothesized that TD would explain TOTs better than BH.

Method

Participants

There were 85 participants involved in the current experiment. Out of them, 30.6% were in the Phonologically related condition, 32.9% were in the Semantically related condition and 36.5% were in the Control condition. All the participants were University students.

Procedure

The students were randomly sorted into 4 Lab groups. Their consent was taken, and all BPS guidelines were followed. They were informed that they had the right to withdraw at any point during the experiment. Lab group 1 was assigned the first condition or the Phonologically related Prime words condition, Lab group 2 was assigned the second condition or the Semantically related Prime words condition. and lab group 3 was assigned the third condition or the Control condition- in which the prime words were neither phonologically nor semantically related to the pictures. Participants in Lab group 4 were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions above. It was a computerised experiment in which the Participants saw the prime word according to the condition they were in and then had to name the picture. The dependant variable was the number of Tip of tongue (TOTs) states recorded by pressing a key. There were in all 60 prime-picture pairs presented to each participant randomly. The results were then recorded and analysed.

Design

The design of the experiment was an independent groups design as each participant was presented with a different condition.  Thus, after the descriptive analysis was carried out, a one way between subjects Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was performed to analyse the data.

Materials

Gorilla software was used to create three conditions in which the Prime word was shown according to the condition followed by the picture presented in random order. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse the data. All BPS guidelines were followed.

Results

The aim of the study was to test the Transmission deficit hypothesis vs the Blocking Hypothesis of Tots. The data was graphically represented in Figure 1. From the figure, it can be inferred that the mean number of TOTs made in the phonologically related condition are lesser than the mean number of TOTs made in the Semantically related and Control conditions. The error bars represent the Standard deviations. For the descriptive statistics, please refer to table 1.

Figure 1

Table 1: Descriptive Statistics

Furthermore, a One-way ANOVA was conducted to investigate the effect of Prime Type on number of TOTs made. The participants were divided into three groups according to the Prime type they were exposed to. It was found that prime type does statistically significantly affect the variance in number of TOTs made F (2,82) = 64.10, p =<0.001. The effect size was large (η2 = 0.610), calculated using eta squared. Post hoc analysis (Bonferroni) was conducted to identify exactly where the significant effect lied. It revealed that the significant difference was between the phonological and semantic condition and the phonological and control condition. Thus, it was found that participants made significantly lesser TOTs in the Phonological condition as compared to Semantic (Mean difference =2.63, SD = 0.27) or control (Mean Difference = 2.65, SD =0.26) conditions. No other effects were found to be significant. All assumptions were met.

Discussion

The results indicate that the participants made significantly lesser TOTs in the phonological prime condition. This supports our hypothesis and strengthens the case for the TD hypothesis. The results of this study are in line with previous research. Many studies have found evidence of TD over BH. It has been found that more often than not, phonological primes facilitate recall and thus the occurrence of TOTs reduces. (James & Burke, 2000; White & Abrams, 2002)

However, some studies have found evidence for BH of the phonological primes. These studies found that phonological primes inhibit the correct response and thus interfere with recall. This means a higher number of TOTs occur. (Jones, 1989; MacKay & Burke, 1990; Burke et al., 1991) This phenomenon can be understood with the help of the research conducted by Abrams and Rodriguez (2005). They found that the inhibition or facilitation of recall was a function of the syntactic class of the phonological prime.

It is known that factors like age, bilingualism or multilingualism, and level of education may affect the occurrence of TOTs. (White and Abrams, 20002; Stasenko and Gollan, 2019) Further, in this study, there were 60 trails which means the results could have been affected by fatigue effects, practise effects and boredom of participants. Moreover, the recording of the DV was done by people and thus is subject to human error, differences in dexterity, etc. The stimuli were not found to be relevant and updated in today’s day and age and this study did not account for cultural differences.

The study of TOTs can have many real-world implications. For example, one study found that in older adults having subjective memory complaints (SMCs) but did not perform worse on any objective neuropsychological tests, tended to make more TOTs than those without SMCs (Kim et al., 2020). This could be indicative of early onset dementia or Alzheimer’s. Though further research needs to be done. Similarly, it was found that TOT positivity bias affects decision making and behaviour (Cleary et al., 2020). People in the TOT state tend to gamble or take gambling risks more than people without the TOT state. Physiological arousal is noted (Ryals et al., 2021; Kurosaki et al., 2022), in support of this theory that there is an emotional state and possibly a bias in the TOT state. It should be further explored. Another direction to explore would be bilingualism or multilingualism, and how people can name something in their own language even if they are in the TOT state. In conclusion, TOT should be further explored to deepen our understand of several processes related to language production and cognitive deficits.

References

Abrams, L., & Rodriguez, E. L. (2005). Syntactic class influences phonological priming of tip-of-the-tongue resolution. Psychonomic Bulletin &Amp; Review, 12(6), 1018–1023. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03206437

Biedermann, B., Ruh, N., Nickels, L., & Coltheart, M. (2007). Information Retrieval in Tip of the Tongue States: New Data and Methodological Advances. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 37(3), 171–198. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-007-9065-8

Bloom, P. A., Friedman, D., Xu, J., Vuorre, M., & Metcalfe, J. (2018). Tip-of-the-tongue states predict enhanced feedback processing and subsequent memory. Consciousness and Cognition, 63, 206–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2018.05.010

Brown, A. S. (1991). A review of the tip-of-the-tongue experience. Psychological Bulletin, 109(2), 204–223. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.109.2.204

Chang, K. L., Hu, P., & Abrams, L. (2022). The tip-of-the-Mandarin tongue: phonological and orthographic priming of TOT resolution in Mandarin speakers. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 37(7), 925–938. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2033803

Cleary, A. M., Huebert, A. M., & McNeely-White, K. L. (2020). The tip-of-the-tongue state bias permeates unrelated concurrent decisions and behavior. Memory & Cognition, 48(4), 596–606. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-00993-7

Eysenck, M. W., & Keane, M. T. (2010). Cognitive psychology : a student’s handbook (6th ed.). Psychology Press.

James, L. E., & Burke, D. M. (2000). Phonological priming effects on word retrieval and tip-of-the-tongue experiences in young and older adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26(6), 1378–1391. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.26.6.1378

Kim J, Kim M, Yoon JH (2020) The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon in older adults with subjective memory complaints. PLoS ONE 15(9): e0239327. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0239327. (n.d.).

Kurosaki, Y., Hashimoto, R., Funayama, M., Terasawa, Y., & Umeda, S. (2022). Word recall process and physiological activation in the tip-of-the-tongue state: Comparison of young and middle-aged groups. Consciousness and Cognition, 106, 103433. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2022.103433

Meyer, A. S., & Bock, K. (1992). The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: Blocking or partial activation? Memory &Amp; Cognition, 20(6), 715–726. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03202721

Ryals, A. J., Kelly, M. E., & Cleary, A. M. (2021). Increased pupil dilation during tip-of-the-tongue states. Consciousness and Cognition, 92, 103152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2021.103152

Schacter, D. L., & Buckner, R. L. (1998). Priming and the Brain. Neuron, 20(2), 185–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0896-6273(00)80448-1

Schwartz, B. L. (1999). Sparkling at the end of the tongue: The etiology of tip-of-the-tongue phenomenology. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6(3), 379–393. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03210827

Stasenko, A., & Gollan, T. H. (2019). Tip of the tongue after any language: Reintroducing the notion of blocked retrieval. Cognition, 193, 104027. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104027

White, K. K., & Abrams, L. (2002). Does priming specific syllables during tip-of-the-tongue states facilitate word retrieval in older adults? Psychology and Aging, 17(2), 226–235. https://doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.17.2.226

Appendix

Submitted to University of Bradford for Cognitive Psychology Module on 11/11/22.