Retrieval of Lexical-Syntactic Features
in Tip-of-the-Tongue States
Michele Miozzo and Alfonso Caramazza
Presented by Ping Yu
Tip of the tongue (TOT)
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Something is at the edge of your
memory but you cannot produce it.
But you feel it is right on the tip of your
tongue
It happens to most of us.
It is a temporary inability to produce
the word/phrase, but the word/phrase
might be retrieved later.
William James (1842 -1910)
a pioneering psychologist and philosopher
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"It is a gap that is
intensely active. A sort
of wraith of the name
is in it, beckoning us in
a given direction,
making us at moments
tingle with the sense of
our closeness and then
letting us sink back
without the longed-for
term."
TOT: meaning and form breakdown
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The word or name is in your memory (your
mental lexicon).
You cannot pronounce the whole word or
phrase …
But you may be able to make some good
guesses, e.g.
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Hmmm, the word starts with a b…
I know, it has three syllabus…
It ends with a d…
So …
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Two accounts of TOTs
 From aspect of phonology retrieval
 From aspect of lexical retrieval
Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) discussed the lexical
retrieval in TOT states. Specifically, they discussed
retrieval of grammatical gender, the initial and final
phonemes of Italian speakers in TOT states.
Two stages in speech production models
concept
speech
lemma
Semantically &
syntactically
specified
representation
Less-studied area
lexeme
Phonological
representation
Lemma and lexeme
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Lemma
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Put, e.g. John put a
book on the table.
Argument features
Subcategorization
features
Tense
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Lexeme
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Number of
morphemes
Number of syllables
Stress
Number of
phonemes
An Example
How the two stages are related?
Nonoverlapping: serial-access model
lemma
lexeme
/k/, /au/
Bidirectional model:
Interaction-activation model
forward activation
lemma
backward activation
lexeme
/k/, /au/
Whatever model it is
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There is no agreement on the specific roles of and
detailed access to the two stages.
Though grammatical, semantic and phonological
information are related in lexical access, there is no
agreement on such fundamental issues as the overall
number of representations, and how they are
organized.
It is agreed that grammatical information is specified
at the level of lemmas. However, it is not agreed how
the grammatical information is related to other
representations and how it is retrieved.
The most clearly proposal:
based on serial-processing model
Syntactic node
(grammatical category
gender)
Conceptual
information
activate
Morphosyntactic
properties
spread automatically and immediately
lemma
an abstract lexical node
Lexeme
Morphological and phonological properties
Some evidence
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Brain-damaged patients
Some patients are able to retrieve
nouns but not verbs, vice verse for
others.
TOTs and the two stage models
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TOTs are often cited as evidence in
support of the two-stage retrieval of
lemmas and lexemes.
TOTs demonstrate that the retrieval of
meaning is independent of its form.
TOTs reinforce ‘feeling of knowing’ since
many phonological features can be
retrieved successfully.
Some facts and arguments
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Fact: alternate words retrieved in TOTs are of
the same grammatical class as the target
word indicates that the target’s grammatical
category is recoverable.
Morphosyntactic information associated with
a specific lemma is available during TOT
states when the corresponding lexeme is not
available
But…
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Those grammatical features such as tense,
number, etc can be easily retrieved from
context.
During TOT experiments, subjects are usually
asked to give definitions of infrequent words.
The class of the retrieved word can be
derived from definitions.
So an ideal method is to demonstrate some
syntactic features, that are not encoded in
the meaning of the words, can be retrieved
during TOT states.
So here is the paper
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Used as evidence: something that has
no meaning but has syntactic features.
The assumption: grammatical gender
(in Italian) has no meaning.
Goal: can the grammatical gender be
retrieved during TOT since it has no
meaning derivable from lemmas?
In the literature
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The answer is yes.
Vigliocco et al. (1997) addressed the TOT
states in which Italian speakers know the
gender of a word that they cannot produce in
a naming task.
Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) reached the
same yes answer, but they
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tried to avoid the bias in TOT experiments
reached some different conclusions
Grammatical gender
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Grammatical gender can be assigned in Italian,
French, Spanish, German, and Dutch, etc.
It is a syntactical category, not a semantic category.
That is, it is independent of the semantics of its noun.
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Fiore (flower) is masculine in Italian but fleur (flower) is
feminine in French.
In Italian, tavolo (table) is masculine, and sedia (chair) is
feminine.
Although in Italian, word endings are indicators for gender
types, e.g. –a for feminine singular and –o for masculine
singular. The correlation is far from perfect. Many nouns
whose gender is not determined from phonological
structures.
Vigliocco et al (1997)
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They ask participants to guess the number of
syllables and as many phonemes as possible
in a naming task in TOT states.
They found that the retrieval of gender in
TOTs has nothing to do with the word
endings since that participants can do equally
well on guessing gender of those words
whose gender do not correlate with the
ending of the word.
Detailed findings of Vigliocco et al (1997)
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Italian speakers in a TOT state could successfully
report the gender of the target word in a
considerable proportion of times (84%).
The availability of gender information is not related to
the availability of phonological features of the word,
such as number of syllables and phoneme identity.
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This is consistent with the two-stage lexical models. That is,
activation of lemmas precede the access of lexemes.
Syntactic information can be retrieved prior to the retrieval
of phonological information.
Critical
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Participants are searching for the word
expected by the experimenter. A word
other than that is considered noise.
41% of the total number of naming
words were different from
experimenters’ words.
Make-up method by Vigliocco et al(1997)
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They have used a post-TOT recognition test designed
to assess the proportion of cases in which
participants were seeking the wrong word.
After TOT, they presented the target word to
participants. Therefore, TOT states were divided into
two groups:
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positive TOTs, where the target word is the one participants
pop in mind;
negative TOTs, where there is a mismatch.
They found that grammatical gender was correctly
retrieved far more frequently for positive TOTs (84%)
than for negative TOTs (53%).
Bias in post-TOT recognition
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Participants were oriented towards the
target words if they figured out the
right phonological features.
They were oriented towards a different
word if they didn’t figure out right
phonological features.
Miozzo and Caramzza (1997)
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They tried to avoid the bias by establishing
more firmly, with a different methodology of
the same question that Vigliocco et al (1997)
addressed.
They tried to compare more directly the
relationship between the gender and the
phonological information retrieved in TOT
states.
Goals of Miozzo and Caramzza (1997)
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How grammatical features are encoded
How the retrieval of these features
interacts with the retrieval of
phonological forms.
Experiment 1
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To demonstrate that gender is not
derived from the phonological
characteristics of the noun in TOT
states.
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-- by evaluating whether retrieval of
gender information was correlated with
retrieval of final vowel in TOT states.
Method
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16 native Italian speakers (staff and students
of the University of Padua)
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A total of 160 uncommon nouns (80 masculine
and 80 feminine) were selected for the naming
task
All target words are singular words ending with a
vowel.
For both masculine and feminine words, there
were 43 regular and 37 irregular words.
Procedure
A choice between
gender
A choice for the final
vowel
Page 1
Picture-naming task
Definition-naming task
TOT
15 s
Feel like knowing
A choice for the initial
vowel or consonant
Page 2
Get the right answer
Don’t know
Recovered
TOT
Results
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60.8% of the alternative names
produced by participants are
considered correct.
Altogether there were 304 TOTs.
Gender can be correctly
selected despite the failure of
retrieval relevant phonological
features (final phonemes).
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In 71.1% of trials in TOTs,
participants guessed the right
gender.
Performance in choosing
gender is much better than in
choose final phonemes (62.4%).
Gender regularity doesn’t affect
the gender choice.
Theoretical issues
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The retrieval of gender does not depend on
the retrieval of final phonemes --- the part of
a word that could potentially help in
retrieving gender information. This is
coincident with the two stages in lexical
models.
However, 76.6% of initial phonemes can be
retrieved successfully. In the discrete twostage lexical model, phonological information
cannot be retrieved at the level of lemma.
Experiment 2
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Vigliocco et al. (1997) discarded all the nontarget responses.
In Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) only 6.3%
responses in TOT were non-taget nouns.
Experiment 2 tried to further reduce the
uncertainty in TOT experiments.
The goal is to demonstrate that some
features available in TOT states are not
recalled by chance.
Method
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32 native Italian speakers (staff and students of the
University of Padua) participated. They didn’t
participate Experiment 1.
The list of nouns was polished a little bit. Those
words that were likely to have alternative non-target
words were discarded. In this way, uncertainty was
decreased.
The same procedure was taken as Experiment 1
except for ‘don’t know’ (DK) states, participants
needed to choose the gender, the initial phonemes,
the final phonemes for DK states as well.
Results
Analysis on bias
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Bias depends on whether the probability
of correctly recognizing gender was
affected by a target’s gender or by a
target’s gender regularity.
In the corpus of the 3000 most Italian
common words, 63% are masculine.
Some comparisons between TOT and DK states
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In TOT responses, 72.4
masculine and 62.3%
feminine.
Among corrected recognized
gender, 69.3% were
irregular nouns and 65.3%
were regular nouns.
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In DK responses, 63.9%
masculine and 36.4%
feminine; bias consistent
with the gender distribution
in Italian
Among corrected recognized
gender, 60.7% were irregular
nouns and 43.8% were
regular nouns. (unclear
bias source)
For final phoneme response, regular gender vowels were more frequently
selected. This bias occurred in both TOT and DK responses. This bias
occurred in Experiment 1 as well.
Conclusion
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Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) replicated and
extended the availability of grammatical
gender in TOTs and some conclusion in
Vigliocco et al’s (1997) study.
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In TOTs, despite the unavailability of the word
form, the syntactic (and some phonological forms)
features of the target words can be retrieved.
Grammatical representation is independent of
phonological representation. This is consistent
with the with the two-stage lexical models, in
which, semantic, syntactic and phonological
features are independent.
But How about initial phonemes?
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Grammatical information can be
retrieved better than initial phonemes
since it is prior to the retrieval of
phonological information.
The results challenge the hypothesis of
a strict dependence between the
retrieval of grammatical and
phonological information.
Also
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The retrieval of initial phonemes
undermines the statement in some
serial models, that is, the access to
lemma leads to access to its syntactic
features automatically and immediately.
My questions
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Does Italian gender really bear no
meaning? Is it really a
grammatical/syntactical category?
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Refer to Phillips and Boroditsky (2003)
Can the retrieval of initial phonemes be
explained by bidirectional model?
Selected references
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Some slides related to background knowledge are
adapted from
http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/language/papers/pagan
elli.pdf
http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/Proceedings/20
03/pdfs/180.pdf
http://www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v17n1/24sb.html
http://www.let.uu.nl/~Frank.Wijnen/personal/neuroc
og_of_lang/intro-lecture.pdf
http://www.indiana.edu/~ascpost/PowerPointpres/Bu
rke_talk.PDF