For a writer, it’s common to reach out to a well-read friend for assistance in recalling a specific word. Yet as frequently as that happens, the sense of coming up short never seems to lessen. Anyone who’s felt the frustration of not being able to remember a word can relate, and middle-aged and older adults may worry that increasing instances indicate their memory is declining.
According to Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts, that isn’t necessarily the case. The co-authors write about the “tip-of-the-tongue,” or TOT, phenomenon in their book Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging, an excerpt of which was published recently in the MIT Press Reader.
Also known as lethologica, the phenomenon is “associated with the inaccessibility of a known word from memory,” per a 2014 study. It’s universally experienced, increases in frequency with age, and occurs most often with proper nouns.
The trouble with studying it in a scientific sense, though modern psychologists have been for nearly a century at least, is that it’s not exactly predictable. Those who do undertake analysis of it generally rely on two modes: naturalistic methods and attempts to induce the phenomenon in a lab, Kreuz and Roberts explain.
The former method may involve participants keeping diaries in which they record their tip-of-the-tongue moments. In one 1999 study, researchers asked three age groups — 18-24, 60-74, and 80-92 — to count their instances of word-finding failures.
While the older adults experienced lethologica more often, the percentage of resolved instances (meaning the word was eventually found) was equal across all three. “Given enough time, even the oldest participants resolved virtually all TOT experiences,” the study authors wrote.
Psychologists Roger Brown and David McNeill, who famously wrote about the phenomenon in the 1966 paper “The ‘Tip of the Tongue’ Phenomenon,” developed a means of inducing lethologica in a lab. They found that giving 56 Harvard University undergraduate students the definitions of English words that were uncommon at the time (for example, “nepotism,” and “cloaca”) often caused TOT.
Brown and McNeill’s assumption was that those words would be in the participants’ passive or recognition vocabularies, but not immediately available in their active recall vocabularies. That distinction, between recognition and recall, is key when it comes to memory. Not being able to recall something doesn’t mean we don’t know it, and it can feel like our brains must work harder to retrieve intel than they must to confirm the knowledge of something when presented with it.
In the 1966 study, students were better able to recall words when being prompted for partial information — being asked how many syllables they thought the word had or what letter it started with. This tells us something about aging and TOT, say Kreuz and Roberts, who note that research suggests partial information is less available to older adults during these experiences.
“As with many issues in cognitive aging, we can view the increase in TOT states as a glass half empty or half full,” the co-authors write. “On the one hand, these retrieval failures can be taken as evidence of weakening connections between the meanings of concepts and the words that denote them in long-term memory. It’s also possible that the increase in word-finding problems with age reflects something very different.”
Citing an argument from psychologist Donna Dahlgren, they point out rather than a worse memory compared to younger people, older adults may simply have more knowledge, implying that it’s harder to sift through its depths in search of a specific term. In that sense, the greater frequency of TOTs just indicates vaster long-term memory, and experiencing them can act as a green light to keep seeking.
“Viewed this way, TOT states might represent not retrieval failures but valuable sources of information,” they write, noting that engaging in aerobic fitness, like walks around the block, can help with word recall.
The authors of a 2021 study take a similarly rosy outlook on the phenomenon, particularly its potential to play a role in designing tests.
“Though tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states are traditionally viewed as instances of retrieval failure, some suggest that they are a unique form of retrieval success,” they explain. “The state indicates the presence of something relevant in memory as opposed to nothing. TOTs potentially present an opportunity to indicate that more knowledge is present than is currently accessible, which might have relevance for how tests are designed.”
To learn more about memory and get tips on strengthening yours, click here.
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