Is "Count" and "Mass" Information Available When the Noun Is Not? An Investigation of Tip of the Tongue States and Anomia

To use a word in a sentence requires speakers to access information such as the meaning of the word, its use in a sentence (i.e., its syntax), and its sound form. In this study we examine whether when speakers cannot retrieve the sound form of a word, they are nevertheless able to indicate its syntactic properties. More specifically, we investigated whether English speakers in a tip of the tongue state, and a brain-damaged speaker in an anomic state, could correctly guess whether target words are either “count nouns” (e.g.,an opinion) or “mass nouns” (e.g.,some knowledge) when they could not say them. Results showed that speakers can correctly guess syntactic features such as count and mass, extending previous results concerning grammatical gender in Italian. We discuss the implications for models of language production in which lexical retrieval includes two steps. The first step involves retrieval of a word's abstract representation, specifying meaning and syntax. The second step involves the retrieval of the sound pattern of the word. Additional evidence from slips of the tongue in Italian, Spanish, and German showing syntactic constraints on phonological errors is also presented.