Abstract
This study explored the sorts of attributes that college students were able to report when in the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state. Forty-five questions were posed; the answers sought were mostly names of famous people or characters in famous literary works. When students believed an answer they provided was wrong but believed that they would recognize the to-be-recalled item if they saw it, they were asked to provide any information they could about the answer. They then received a four-alternative, forced-choice recognition test. In addition to such structural attributes as word length, letters in the target name, and phonemic features, the students often reported frequency of occurrence of the word and such semantic attributes as country or language associated with the name, descriptive attributes, and context or situational attributes. The TOT states were predictive of superior recognition, but the number and types of attributes reported did not appear to be systematically related to recognition success.
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The author wishes to thank J. D. Savage for assistance throughout this study and R. Galford, R. Lieser, J. Parker, and R. Sienkiewicz for assistance in judging categories of response. The author acknowledges, with appreciation, the comments of D. Meissner, N. Furlong, and R. Maiden on a draft of this paper.
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Lovelace, E. Attributes that come to mind in the TOT state. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 25, 370–372 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330370
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330370