An Empirical Study of Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon
Tan Xiao · Jiefangjun Waiyu Xueyuan xuebao · 2003
Tipofthetongue (TOT) phenomenon is a very common type of speech errors. The present paper studies TOTs with Chinese learners. It shows that both phonological cues and semantic cues are significant in aiding lexical retrieval. The number of syllables positively correlates with TOT occurrence while word frequency has limited predictive power on it. The study also indicates that Chinese, the learners' mother tongue, plays a dominant role in recall of English words and that unlike native speakers, the Chinese learners of English are not so sensitive to syntactic features of English words, including that of part of speech.