Tip-of-the-Tongue States and Aging: Contrasting Psycholinguistic and Metacognitive Perspectives

A tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT) refers to the experience of feeling certain that one knows a word, but being unable to retrieve it. A consistent finding in the literature is that TOTs are more frequent in older adults than in younger adults. We describe 2 hypotheses that account for this finding. The decrement view explains the increase in TOTs with age as a function of deteriorating connections between semantic and lexical nodes. The incremental-knowledge view accounts for the effect in terms of older adults' generally greater vocabulary. We integrated both views into a metacognitive account of TOTs, which differs from the psycholinguistic approach to TOTs and aging. Psycholinguistic approaches focus on the TOT as retrieval failure, whereas metacognitive accounts focus on the TOT as a phenomenological experience. We emphasize the role of the metacognitive approach for moving aging research beyond the study of deficits and decline and toward models of successful aging.