Lab: Tip-of-the-Tongue and the Transmission Deficit Hypothesis

The purpose of this laboratory is to look at an example of information retrieval; the production of words. All of us fail at this from time to time, especially as one gets older, yet we feel that we know the word even though we can't produce it. These instances of word retrieval failure are known as tip-of-the-tongue experiences, and are to be distinguished from the more severe retrieval problems associated with anomia. A range of explanations have been provided for this curious experience. The most prominent explanation in the literature claims that there is a weak connection between a word's lexical entry (a mental representation of the word involving syntactic and some semantic information) and the phonological information that drives the articulatory (speech) tract, which sometimes doesn't work; i.e., a transmission deficit occurs. One knows the word because of the lexical entry, but can't $s a y$ it (produce the sound object) because of the transmission deficit. This experiment will test the transmission deficit hypothesis.

You were required to provide data for a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiment based on interference effects (although this would not have been obvious on the basis of your participation alone). On subsequent consideration I concluded that the design of the interference TOT experiment might be a bit too conceptually challenging for many of you, so I have decided to change to an experiment on TOTs that I have run in the past. This one looks at the transmission deficit hypothesis, as referred to above. No further data collection is required as I have a data set from four years ago which we can use. Through the Laboratory 2 data collection exercise you should now have a good idea of what TOT states are like. You will however engage in a 20 minute demonstration of this transmission deficit hypothesis experiment in the Laboratory 2 session, prior to an explanation and discussion concerning the conceptual basis and methodology.

Price: $10.83

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 6 pages, 483 words and 3 charts.
Deliverable: Word Document