Why don't you remember some words even though they are "on the tip of your tongue"?
Have you ever had trouble remembering someone's name? You may be able to visualize the person's face clearly in your mind, and you will recognize the name immediately if a friend mentions it in front of you. Although this is often repeated with nouns, the same is true when any other word is forgotten. This does not mean that you cannot remember the connotation of the word or its meaning, but only that you cannot find its linguistic designation.
The problem of finding words is a common part of the cognitive control problems that middle-aged and elderly people suffer.
These failures happen without warning and with very familiar words and names that a person knows well. Researchers have found that the most difficult-to-retrieve words are proper names and names of things. This inability to conjure up a word from memory can last for any period, from a fraction of a second to several minutes or even hours, and it can be truly offensive. In fact, older people often cite the problem of not finding words they know when asked about the bother of aging.
In such cases, the person is confident of his knowledge of the word he is looking for, such as if a term is on the tip of his tongue, but for some reason he is not able to bring it up and say it at least at that moment. Psychologists call this case "a state at the tip of the tongue", and here the question is: Is this condition a warning of a memory disorder as it appears?
Studying the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon poses many challenges for psychologists who want to understand why and how it occurs. They are like astronomers who study ephemeral phenomena such as stellar explosions, which are also called the supernova phenomenon. Researchers know that the phenomenon of missing a known word will occur, but they cannot know exactly when. This uncertainty has led to two distinctly different ways of analyzing and understanding it: by natural methods, or by inducing a failure to find words experimentally in the laboratory.
Researchers who study the word search problem and the phenomenon of "on the tip of the tongue" have tried to identify two important points in particular: the number of times these cases are repeated, and the possible ways to solve them. What is meant here is to remember the word required by the person automatically and without outside help (such as searching for the word in A book, online, or having someone else provide the answer).
Examining daily data, in which people write down every time they are exposed to a state of inability to conjure up a word they know, allows researchers to evaluate the frequency of the condition as well as the rate at which it resolves. The results indicate that university students are exposed to the "tip of the tongue" once or twice a week, while this rate is slightly higher for people who are in their sixties and early seventies.
The participants in this study, who are in their eighties, suffer from this condition twice as much as university students. The study of the daily notes also showed that the problem of not finding the word is often solved later, with a success rate of more than 90 percent.
However, caution must be exercised when interpreting such daily data, because its accuracy may be affected by several factors. Older adults who are usually more anxious about memory lapses will be more interested in recording cases of word failure, and perhaps also because their lives are quiet and less crowded than younger participants. Age, and participants may also be more inclined to record cases that they are able to solve or remedy than cases that remained unresolved.
An alternative way to study failure to find a word is to create the case experimentally. A way to do this was developed by psychologists Roger Brown and David McNeill while they were both at Harvard University.
The two scientists found that simply giving participants dictionary definitions of uncommonly used English words will often lead to a failure to recall the word, and one of the examples they used during the study was finding the word that it defined in the dictionary as follows: “A navigation instrument used to measure the angular distance, especially the height of the sun. Moon and stars while sailing. "
(In the event that this definition may also cause you to lose a word even though it is at the tip of your tongue, then the word you are looking for is: hexagon, which is an optical instrument that measures the angular distance relative to the angle between two points, such as the sun and the horizon. It is used for navigation and area and it is called this name Relative to its shape, which resembles approximately one sixth of a circle).
In this experiment, the participants were sometimes able to say the desired word without difficulty, and at other times the participants had no idea what word the definition was describing. But when participants find themselves in a "tip-of-the-tongue" state, Brown and McNeill ask additional questions. The researchers discovered that in such a case, people can provide partial information about the desired word, even if the word itself eludes them and cannot find it.
For example, participants had a much higher chance of success when asked to guess the number of syllables of a word, or the letter it started with. It is not surprising that when people make mistakes while trying to retrieve a word, they often mention words that have roughly the same meaning.
When the participants were given the definition of the word "hexagon", some of them mentioned the words "astrolabe" or "compass". However, some of them have sometimes mentioned words verbally similar only to the intended word.
It should be noted here that the same study when conducted on elderly people revealed that partial information - such as knowing the first letter of the word - is less available to them.
As is the case with many problems with cognitive aging, the high incidence of inability to conjure up a word on the tip of the tongue can be viewed as being half an empty or half full cup. That is, these cases of evocation failure can be considered evidence of the weak link between meaning and the word that denotes it in long-term memory, but on the other hand, it can also reflect the rise of these cases at advanced ages, a completely different matter.
Psychologist Donna Dahlgren of Indiana University believes that the issue is not related to age, but rather to the amount of knowledge. If older people have more information stored in long-term memory, then they will face more cases of inability to retrieve words known to them.
These cases can also be useful, as they can be considered as evidence for the elderly that the desired word is known to them, even if it is not possible to reach it at the moment. This metacognitive information is useful because it indicates that spending more time trying to overcome the inability to conjure the word may ultimately lead to success in retrieving it.
When looking at the matter in this way, the phenomenon of "the word at the tip of the tongue" cannot be considered as a failure to evoke the word, but rather as a useful source of information as well. And if you are an elderly person and are concerned about the number of times your sluggishness occurs, there is research suggesting that this number may decrease if you stay fit by doing simple outdoor exercises.
In other words, the next time you have a problem conjuring up a word that you know and feel that it eludes you even though it's on the tip of your tongue, you can help yourself find it just by stepping out into the fresh air, and taking a little walking tour around your building.
BBC
