Deborah M. Burke

On the tip of the tongue : what causes word finding failures in young and older adults ?

Abstract This paper develops a new theory of the tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon. Within this interactive activation model of speech production, TOTs occur when the connections between lexical and phonological nodes become weakened due to infrequent use, nonrecent use, and aging, causing a reduction in the transmission of priming. Predictions of the theory were examined using retrospective questionnaires, diary procedures, and a laboratory word retrieval task. In Study 1, young, midage, and older adults recorded naturally occurring TOTs in structured diaries during a four week interval in their everyday life. TOT targets were infrequent words in the language, and proper names, the largest category of TOT targets, were the names of acquaintances who had not been contacted recently, especially for older adults. Persistent alternates, i.e., incorrect words that came repeatedly to mind, shared phonology and grammatical class with TOT targets, and delayed TOT resolution. Older adults experienced more TOTs, but fewer persistent alternates. An influence of expectations on these age differences was ruled out by responses to the retrospective questionnaires, which indicated no age differences in expected number of TOTs. In Study 2, the basic results for age and persistent alternates were replicated in the laboratory for experimenter-selected TOT targets. The experimental study also demonstrated that proper names of famous people are especially vulnerable to TOTs in older adults.

Language, memory, and aging

Preface 1. Theories of information processing and theories of aging 2. Effects of aging on verbal abilities: examination of the psychometric literature 3. Aging and individual differences in memory for written discourse 4. Geriatric psycholinguistics: syntactic limitations of oral and written language 5. Aging and memory activation: the priming of semantic and episodic memories 6. Automatic and effortful semantic processes in old age: experimental and naturalistic approaches 7. Integrating information from discourse: do older adults show deficits? 8. Comprehension of pragmatic implications in young and older adults 9. Capacity theory and the processing of inferences 10. Age differences in memory for texts: production deficiency or processing liminations? 11. Episodic memory and knowledge interactions across adulthood 12. The disorder of naming in Alzheimers disease 13. Language and memory processing in semile dementia Alzheimers type 14. Patterns of language and memory in old age Author index Subject index.

Phonological priming effects on word retrieval and tip-of-the-tongue experiences in young and older adults

In a repetition priming paradigm, young and older participants read aloud prime words that sometimes shared phonological components with a target word that answered a general knowledge question. In Experiment 1, prior processing of phonologically related words decreased tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) and increased correct responses to subsequent questions. In Experiment 2, the priming task occurred only when the participant could not answer the question. Processing phonologically related words increased correct recall, but only when the participant was in a TOT state. Phonological priming effects were age invariant, although older adults produced relatively more TOTs. Results support the transmission deficit model that the weak connections among phonological representations that cause TOTs are strengthened by production of phonologically related words. There was no evidence that phonologically related words block TOT targets.

Chapter Five Cognition and Aging: A Theory of New Learning and the Use of Old Connections

Summary This chapter describes a detailed theory of perception, production and memory for language and applies it to the problem of cognitive decline in old age. Altering a single parameter in the theory (rate of priming) was shown to account for a wide range of established age differences in cognitive ability, and to suggest an alternative framework for understanding some findings which in the past have seemed contradictory. Examples of these findings are effects of age on learning, rate of processing (general slowing), and the tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon. The theory postulates different mechanisms for retrieving existing representations in memory vs. learning new or unique representations and predicts that new learning will be especially vulnerable to aging. Specifically, the theory predicts that age differences will increase with the number of new connections required in a memory task, but will diminish if already established connections are sufficient to accomplish the task. This prediction cuts across specific paradigms and theoretical distinctions and applies to a broad range of memory phenomena. By way of illustration, we review findings from experimental studies of encoding specificity, implicit versus explicit memory, and semantic versus episodic priming, and show how the observed pattern of age differences is consistent with disruption of new, learning and preservation of memory involving existing, connections. The theory also makes some interesting and, genuinely new predictions for future research that are, spelled out here, for example, an age-linked decline in the, detection of speech errors.

Semantic priming in young and older adults: Evidence for age constancy in automatic and attentional processes.

Automatic and attentional components of semantic priming and the relation of each to episodic memory were evaluated in young and older adults. Category names served as prime words, and the relatedness of the prime to a subsequent lexical decision target was varied orthogonally with whether the target category was expected or unexpected. At a prime-target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) of 410 ms, target words in the same category had faster lexical decision latencies than did different category targets. This effect was not significant at a 1,550-ms SOA and was attributed to automatic processes. Expected category targets had faster latencies than unexpected category targets at the 410-ms SOA, and the magnitude of the effect increased at the 1,550-ms SOA. This effect was attributed to attentional processes. These patterns of priming were obtained for both age groups, but in a surprise memory test older adults had poorer recall of primes and targets. We discuss the implications of these results for the hypothesis that older adults suffer deficits in selective attention and for the related hypothesis that attentional deficits impair semantic processing, which causes memory decrements in old age.

Memory for proper names: a review.

Abstract Proper names have a frustrating propensity to be forgotten. A considerable amount of laboratory and naturalistic data has demonstrated this vulnerability of proper names to memory errors both in learning new names and in retrieving familiar names. Moreover, retrieval of familiar proper names is especially affected in old age and in some cases of aphasia. This pattern of vulnerability offers an important opportunity for gaining insight into basic memory processes and architecture by identifying the characteristics of proper names that disrupt memory.

Word associations in old age: Evidence for consistency in semantic encoding during adulthood.

Word associations of 80 young and 80 older adults were compared for 113 stimulus words. The proportion of paradigmatic responses varied with the grammatical class of the stimulus word and with the vocabulary level of the subject, but not with age. The same proportion of young and older adults gave the most common responses. Although older adults had a greater number of unique responses, this seems to reflect age differences in vocabulary level, as vocabulary but not age was a good predictor. Within-subject variability was also comparable across age, as on a retest young and older adults gave the same proportion of responses that were identical to those on the original test. Both age groups were more likely to repeat common than uncommon responses on the retest. This, together with analyses of response latency, suggests equivalent use of strategic processes across age. The results indicate that semantic structure and semantic encoding in adults are related to verbal ability, but not to age.

On the tip-of-the-tongue: Neural correlates of increased word-finding failures in normal aging

Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences are frustrating word-finding failures where people are temporarily unable to produce a word they are certain they know. TOT frequency increases with normal aging during adulthood, and behavioral evidence suggests that the underlying deficit is in retrieving the complete phonology of the target word during production. The present study investigated the neural correlates of this phonological retrieval deficit. We obtained 3-D T1-weighted structural magnetic resonance images (MRI) for healthy participants between 19 and 88 years old and used voxel-based morphometry to measure gray matter density throughout the brain. In a separate session, participants named celebrities cued by pictures and descriptions, indicating when they had a TOT, and also completed Ravens Progressive Matrices (RPM), a task that does not involve phonological production. The number of TOTs increased with age and also with gray matter atrophy in the left insula, an area implicated in phonological production. The relation between TOTs and left insula atrophy cannot be attributed to the correlation of each variable with age because TOTs were related to insula atrophy even with age effects removed. Moreover, errors on the RPM increased with age, but performance did not correlate with gray matter density in the insula. These results provide, for the first time, an association between a region in the neural language system and the rise in age-related word-finding failures and suggest that age-related atrophy in neural regions important for phonological production may contribute to age-related word production failures.

H.M. Revisited: Relations between Language Comprehension, Memory, and the Hippocampal System

Three studies tested the claim that H.M. exhibits a fipure memory deficitfl that has left his ability to comprehend language unimpaired relative to memory-normal controls. In Study 1, H.M. and memory-normal controls of comparable intelligence, education, and age indicated whether sentences were ambiguous or unambiguous, and H.M. detected ambiguities significantly less often than controls. In Study 2, participants identified the two meanings of visually presented sentences that they knew were ambiguous, and relative to controls, H.M. rarely discovered the ambiguities without help and had difficulty understanding the first meanings, experimenter requests, and his own output. Study 3 replicated these results and showed that they were not due to brain damage per se or to cohort effects: Unlike H.M., a patient with bilateral frontal lobe damage detected the ambiguities as readily as young and same-cohort older controls. These results bear on two general classes of theories in use within a wide range of neurosciences and cognitive sciences: The data favor fidistributed-memory theoriesfl that ascribe H.M.s deficit to semantic-level binding processes that are inherent to both language comprehension and memory, over fistages-of-processing theories, fl where H.M.s defective storage processes have no effect on language comprehension.

Asymmetric Aging Effects on Semantic and Phonological Processes: Naming in the Picture-Word Interference Task

In 2 experiments, participants named pictures while ignoring auditory word distractors. For pictures with homophone names (e.g., ball), distractors semantically related to the nondepicted meaning (e.g., prom) facilitated naming by top-down phonological connections for young but not for older adults. Slowing from unrelated distractors and facilitation from phonologically related distractors were age invariant except in distractors that were both semantically and phonologically related. Only distractors semantically related to the picture interfered more for older than younger adults. These results ar einconsistent with age-linked deficits in inhibition of irrelevant information from either internal or external sources. Rather, aging affects priming transmission in a connectionist network with asymmetric effects on semantic and phonological connections involved in comprehension and production, respectively.