Retrieval of Lexical-Syntactic Features

in Tip-of-the-Tongue States

Michele Miozzo and Alfonso Caramazza

Presented by Ping Yu

Tip of the tongue (TOT) Something is at the edge of your

memory but you cannot produce it. But you feel it is right on the tip of

your tongue It happens to most of us. It is a temporary inability to produce

the word/phrase, but the word/phrase might be retrieved later.

William James (1842 -1910)a pioneering psychologist and philosopher

"It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term."

TOT: meaning and form breakdown

The word or name is in your memory (your mental lexicon).

You cannot pronounce the whole word or phrase …

But you may be able to make some good guesses, e.g. Hmmm, the word starts with a b… I know, it has three syllabus… It ends with a d…

So … Two accounts of TOTs

From aspect of phonology retrieval From aspect of lexical retrieval

Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) discussed the lexical retrieval in TOT states. Specifically, they discussed retrieval of grammatical gender, the initial and final phonemes of Italian speakers in TOT states.

Two stages in speech production models

Semantically & syntactically specified representation

lemma

Phonological representation

lexeme

Less-studied area

speechconcept

Lemma and lexeme Lemma

Put, e.g. John put a book on the table.

Argument features Subcategorization f

eatures Tense

Lexeme Number of

morphemes Number of

syllables Stress Number of

phonemes

An Example

How the two stages are related?Nonoverlapping: serial-access model

lemma

lexeme

/k/, /au/

Bidirectional model: Interaction-activation model

lemma lexeme

/k/, /au/

forward activation

backward activation

Whatever model it is There is no agreement on the specific roles of

and detailed access to the two stages. Though grammatical, semantic and

phonological information are related in lexical access, there is no agreement on such fundamental issues as the overall number of representations, and how they are organized.

It is agreed that grammatical information is specified at the level of lemmas. However, it is not agreed how the grammatical information is related to other representations and how it is retrieved.

The most clearly proposal:based on serial-processing model

Conceptual information

Syntactic node

(grammatical category

gender)

lemma

an abstract lexical node

activate

spread automatically and immediately

LexemeMorphological and phonological properties

Morpho-syntactic properties

Some evidence

Brain-damaged patients Some patients are able to retrieve

nouns but not verbs, vice verse for others.

TOTs and the two stage models TOTs are often cited as evidence in su

pport of the two-stage retrieval of lemmas and lexemes.

TOTs demonstrate that the retrieval of meaning is independent of its form.

TOTs reinforce ‘feeling of knowing’ since many phonological features can be retrieved successfully.

Some facts and arguments Fact: alternate words retrieved in TOTs are

of the same grammatical class as the target word indicates that the target’s grammatical category is recoverable.

Morphosyntactic information associated with a specific lemma is available during TOT states when the corresponding lexeme is not available

But… Those grammatical features such as

tense, number, etc can be easily retrieved from context.

During TOT experiments, subjects are usually asked to give definitions of infrequent words. The class of the retrieved word can be derived from definitions.

So an ideal method is to demonstrate some syntactic features, that are not encoded in the meaning of the words, can be retrieved during TOT states.

So here is the paper

Used as evidence: something that has no meaning but has syntactic features.

The assumption: grammatical gender (in Italian) has no meaning.

Goal: can the grammatical gender be retrieved during TOT since it has no meaning derivable from lemmas?

In the literature The answer is yes. Vigliocco et al. (1997) addressed the TOT st

ates in which Italian speakers know the gender of a word that they cannot produce in a naming task.

Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) reached the same yes answer, but they tried to avoid the bias in TOT experiments reached some different conclusions

Grammatical gender Grammatical gender can be assigned in Italian, Fre

nch, Spanish, German, and Dutch, etc. It is a syntactical category, not a semantic category.

That is, it is independent of the semantics of its noun.

Fiore (flower) is masculine in Italian but fleur (flower) is feminine in French.

In Italian, tavolo (table) is masculine, and sedia (chair) is feminine.

Although in Italian, word endings are indicators for gender types, e.g. –a for feminine singular and –o for masculine singular. The correlation is far from perfect. Many nouns whose gender is not determined from phonological structures.

Vigliocco et al (1997) They ask participants to guess the number

of syllables and as many phonemes as possible in a naming task in TOT states.

They found that the retrieval of gender in TOTs has nothing to do with the word endings since that participants can do equally well on guessing gender of those words whose gender do not correlate with the ending of the word.

Detailed findings of Vigliocco et al (1997) Italian speakers in a TOT state could

successfully report the gender of the target word in a considerable proportion of times (84%).

The availability of gender information is not related to the availability of phonological features of the word, such as number of syllables and phoneme identity.

This is consistent with the two-stage lexical models. That is, activation of lemmas precede the access of lexemes.

Syntactic information can be retrieved prior to the retrieval of phonological information.

Critical

Participants are searching for the word expected by the experimenter. A word other than that is considered noise. 41% of the total number of naming words were different from experimenters’ words.

Make-up method by Vigliocco et al(1997)

They have used a post-TOT recognition test designed to assess the proportion of cases in which participants were seeking the wrong word.

After TOT, they presented the target word to participants. Therefore, TOT states were divided into two groups:

positive TOTs, where the target word is the one participants pop in mind;

negative TOTs, where there is a mismatch. They found that grammatical gender was

correctly retrieved far more frequently for positive TOTs (84%) than for negative TOTs (53%).

Bias in post-TOT recognition

Participants were oriented towards the target words if they figured out the right phonological features.

They were oriented towards a different word if they didn’t figure out right phonological features.

Miozzo and Caramzza (1997)

They tried to avoid the bias by establishing more firmly, with a different methodology of the same question that Vigliocco et al (1997) addressed.

They tried to compare more directly the relationship between the gender and the phonological information retrieved in TOT states.

Goals of Miozzo and Caramzza (1997)

How grammatical features are encoded

How the retrieval of these features interacts with the retrieval of phonological forms.

Experiment 1

To demonstrate that gender is not derived from the phonological characteristics of the noun in TOT states. -- by evaluating whether retrieval of

gender information was correlated with retrieval of final vowel in TOT states.

Method 16 native Italian speakers (staff and

students of the University of Padua) A total of 160 uncommon nouns (80

masculine and 80 feminine) were selected for the naming task

All target words are singular words ending with a vowel.

For both masculine and feminine words, there were 43 regular and 37 irregular words.

Procedure

Picture-naming task

Definition-naming task

15 s

Don’t know

Get the right answer

Feel like knowing

TOT

A choice between genderA choice for the final vowel Page 1

A choice for the initial vowel or consonant Page 2

Recovered TOT

Results 60.8% of the alternative names

produced by participants are considered correct.

Altogether there were 304 TOTs.

Gender can be correctly selected despite the failure of retrieval relevant phonological features (final phonemes).

In 71.1% of trials in TOTs, participants guessed the right gender.

Performance in choosing gender is much better than in choose final phonemes (62.4%).

Gender regularity doesn’t affect the gender choice.

Theoretical issues The retrieval of gender does not depend

on the retrieval of final phonemes --- the part of a word that could potentially help in retrieving gender information. This is coincident with the two stages in lexical models.

However, 76.6% of initial phonemes can be retrieved successfully. In the discrete two-stage lexical model, phonological information cannot be retrieved at the level of lemma.

Experiment 2 Vigliocco et al. (1997) discarded all the non-

target responses. In Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) only 6.3% r

esponses in TOT were non-taget nouns. Experiment 2 tried to further reduce the un

certainty in TOT experiments. The goal is to demonstrate that some featur

es available in TOT states are not recalled by chance.

Method 32 native Italian speakers (staff and students

of the University of Padua) participated. They didn’t participate Experiment 1.

The list of nouns was polished a little bit. Those words that were likely to have alternative non-target words were discarded. In this way, uncertainty was decreased.

The same procedure was taken as Experiment 1 except for ‘don’t know’ (DK) states, participants needed to choose the gender, the initial phonemes, the final phonemes for DK states as well.

Results

Analysis on bias

Bias depends on whether the probability of correctly recognizing gender was affected by a target’s gender or by a target’s gender regularity.

In the corpus of the 3000 most Italian common words, 63% are masculine.

Some comparisons between TOT and DK states

In TOT responses, 72.4 masculine and 62.3% feminine.

Among corrected recognized gender, 69.3% were irregular nouns and 65.3% were regular nouns.

In DK responses, 63.9% masculine and 36.4% feminine; bias consistent with the gender distribution in Italian

Among corrected recognized gender, 60.7% were irregular nouns and 43.8% were regular nouns. (unclear bias source)

For final phoneme response, regular gender vowels were more frequently selected. This bias occurred in both TOT and DK responses. This bias occurred in Experiment 1 as well.

Conclusion Miozzo and Caramazza (1997) replicated an

d extended the availability of grammatical gender in TOTs and some conclusion in Vigliocco et al’s (1997) study. In TOTs, despite the unavailability of the word f

orm, the syntactic (and some phonological forms) features of the target words can be retrieved.

Grammatical representation is independent of phonological representation. This is consistent with the with the two-stage lexical models, in which, semantic, syntactic and phonological features are independent.

But How about initial phonemes?

Grammatical information can be retrieved better than initial phonemes since it is prior to the retrieval of phonological information.

The results challenge the hypothesis of a strict dependence between the retrieval of grammatical and phonological information.

Also

The retrieval of initial phonemes undermines the statement in some serial models, that is, the access to lemma leads to access to its syntactic features automatically and immediately.

My questions

Does Italian gender really bear no meaning? Is it really a grammatical/syntactical category? Refer to Phillips and Boroditsky (2003)

Can the retrieval of initial phonemes be explained by bidirectional model?

Selected references Some slides related to background knowledge are

adapted from http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/language/papers/pa

ganelli.pdf http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/Proceeding

s/2003/pdfs/180.pdf http://www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v17n1/24sb.htm

l http://www.let.uu.nl/~Frank.Wijnen/personal/neur

ocog_of_lang/intro-lecture.pdf http://www.indiana.edu/~ascpost/PowerPointpres

/Burke_talk.PDF