It’s happened to all of us: you’re in the middle of a conversation and suddenly you’re left with a blank expression. The word you were about to say gets stuck on the tip of your tongue. You can’t remember it, even though you feel like it’s floating around in your head. You might even say to the people around you, “Wait a second, I’ve got it,” but it’s as if the word has vanished. What happened?
For years, psychologists have studied this phenomenon and believe it is due to a disconnect between the concept implied by the word and its lexical representation. In fact, to speak fluently, it is not only necessary to master the concepts we wish to express but also to have the lexical representation of the word at hand.
When we get a word stuck on the tip of our tongue, we have the concept in mind, and we may even remember one or two letters of the word in question, but we don’t have the complete lexical representation, so we can’t quite pronounce the word we want. In practice, we know what we want to say, but we don’t remember how to pronounce it. Now, a new study delves into this phenomenon and offers a solution.
A failed learning process
Psychologists at McMaster University in Canada recruited a series of participants and provoked the experience of having a word on the tip of their tongue. They did this by presenting them with definitions of unfamiliar words, such as: What is the name of the calculating instrument in which beads are slid onto rods? Sometimes the participants quickly found the answer, other times they indicated they didn’t know, and in still other cases they said the word was on the tip of their tongue but couldn’t quite manage to say it.
After 10 or 30 seconds, the researchers revealed the answer. Interestingly, activating this disconnection made people more likely to experience the phenomenon again, even if they already knew the word, regardless of how much time had passed. In fact, the experiment was repeated 5 minutes, 48 hours, and even a week after the initial experiment.
These results suggest that having a word on the tip of the tongue is not simply a disconnect between the concept and the lexical representation, but rather a failed learning process.
To understand what happens in the brain, we can imagine a hiker who knew the route but got lost before reaching his destination. This hiker would likely begin to take new paths, which would lead him further and further away from his destination, thus sowing more chaos and confusion.
This is the same way our brain behaves when it can’t find its way between the concept, the letters, and the sounds. And this experiment suggests that if we take the wrong path once, we’re more likely to get lost again and stray.
Don’t let them give you the answer when the word is on the tip of your tongue
These results indicate that having someone reveal the word to you isn’t a good thing, because you’re likely to get stuck again next time, feeling even more frustrated. This is because when the word is revealed to us, our brain doesn’t complete the process of searching for the lexical representation. To continue the hiker analogy, it’s as if someone picked you up and took you in a helicopter directly to your destination. You’ll have arrived, but you won’t have learned the correct route.
Therefore, the best way to help someone who has a word stuck on the tip of their tongue is to help them find the path on their own, giving them small clues that will help them find the lexical representation in their own memory. In fact, the experiment found that when participants were able to solve the problem themselves, they learned the word and were able to recall it without difficulty.
So the next time you have a word on the tip of your tongue, don’t ask for it to be revealed to you, but rather for help finding the path yourself.
Reference:
D’Angelo, M. & Humphreys, K. (2015) Tip-of-the-tongue states reoccur because of implicit learning, but resolving them helps. Cognition; 142: 166-190.
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