The Effect of Different Types of Semantic Cues in Tip-of-the-Tongue States

The Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) state is an experience when a person has a strong feeling that he knows a word but at the moment it cannot be retrieved. It is well known that some cues, including semantic ones, can help to resolve the TOT states. However, it remains unknown which types of them are most effective. The purpose of this study was to find out what type of semantic cues (cohyponym or association) helps better to relieve the ToT state. We conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to name words by their definitions. Then, if they couldn’t remember the word, they saw cues for the target word (associations or cohyponym): this should have helped to retrieve the target word. We also asked the participants if they felt the ToT state if they could not remember the word. According to our hypothesis the ToT state would have arised quite often due to the complexity and low frequency of target words. We hypothesized that according to the theory of partial activation and the results obtained in Meyer & Bock (1992) cues would help rather than prevent the retrieval of the target word. Also, according to the blocking theory and the results obtained in the experiments of Jones & Langford (1987) and Jones (1989), we assumed that association cues would help better, because cohyponym cues would compete with the target word for the activation, based on the fact that cohyponym and the target word are in the very close connection in the mental vocabulary. The results confirm the partial activation theory: the cues helped rather than prevented the retrieval of the target word. The results also show a significant effect in the answers when there was the ToT state and it wasn’t: this shows that the cues helped better when a person had the ToT state rather than he didn’t. Blocking theory was not confirmed in our study: the results didn’t show a significant difference, cohyponyms and associations equally affected the resolution of the “tip of the tongue” state.