Chapter 8 - Tip-of-the-Tongue States Early and Late in Life

Summary

One of the most replicated findings about TOT states is that older adults experience more TOT states than younger adults. We argue that young children also experience TOT states, and that younger children, at least as young as six years old, experience more TOT states than do older adults. These results are consistent with both theoretical approaches – direct-access theories that propose that TOT states arise from failures in word retrieval as well as metacognitive models in which TOT states arise from heuristic cues and clues about that retrieval. In the direct-access word-retrieval approach, the younger children and the older adults are said to have weaker connections between semantic and phonological nodes, leading to more retrieval failures and therefore more TOT states. In the metacognitive model, older children and older adults apply a more complete set of heuristics to determine whether a TOT state is present when word retrieval fails, thus leading to more accurate TOT states. Delineation of these models requires further work.