Phonological priming and tip-of-the-tongue state: evidence from young and older italian adults

Abstract: The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (TOT) is a lexical retrieval failure coupled with a strong feeling of being on the verge of recall. An occasional TOT state is normal for people of all ages, but it becomes more frequent with aging. TOTs occur when semantic and lexical representations corresponding to a word are activated but activation of phonological information about the word is incomplete. One of the most influential explanations of the TOT phenomenon is the transmission -deficit model developed by Burke and colleagues (Burke et al. 1991; Burke, & Shafto 2004) who proposed that activation of phonology fails because connections to phonological representations become weak due to three causes: aging of the speaker, infrequent activation and lack of recent activation of representations. In this study we tested some of the predictions of the transmission deficit model with Italian speakers, inducing TOT states in 15 young and 15 older adults. Participants were asked questions that are correctly answered by single words. Half of the target to-be-answered words were nouns and half were proper names. Half of the trials were preceded by a phonological prime and half were not. The results showed that older adults experienced more TOT states than young adults in all the conditions. Phonological priming facilitated words retrieval only for older participants and differences between proper and common nouns did not emerge.