How concerned should you be?
Sometimes, in the
middle of telling a story, making a point, or explaining a request, we suddenly
get stuck on a word. It just won’t come, even though we have the strong feeling
that it should be right there.
It’s not that we
don’t have the vocabulary to describe what we want to say; we most definitely
know the word. We just can’t get it out. What is happening when words fail us?
Or maybe it is we who are failing the words?
Tip of the tongue
On its own, occasionally forgetting a word is a completely
normal part of life.
The psychological
term for this experience is “tip of the tongue” state. It was first studied by
experimental psychologists in the 1960s who showed that people in a tip of the tongue
state were able to access information about letters, sounds, and meanings
related to the word they were searching for even when they couldn’t come up
with the word.
When you forget a
word, it has not disappeared from memory; it is still there, but in the moment
of speaking something is preventing it from being fully retrieved.
What would prevent
the retrieval of a word? A word can be thought of as a collection of features:
it has a meaning and associated meanings and images. It has a form, which includes
its pronunciation, a written representation, and a syllable and stress pattern.
It also leaves traces
in neural connections of how frequently or recently it has been used.
The retrieval of a
word might be disrupted by a problem in activating one or just a few of those
features. Stress, fatigue, and distraction can all lead to insufficient
activation for retrieval.
Even deaf users of sign languages experience “tip of the
finger” states when they forget a sign.
More serious problems
that damage or slow the necessary neural connections can also cause problems
for word retrieval. The inability to find words can indicate brain injury or
infection, strokes, and degenerative
diseases like Alzheimer’s.
However, in those
cases, word-forgetting will be only one of many other symptoms. On its own,
occasionally forgetting a word is a completely normal part of life.
Tip of the tongue
states are a common experience across languages. Even deaf users of sign
languages experience “tip of the finger” states when they forget a sign. They
are also common across the age range. However, they do become more frequent as
we get older.
Forgetting a word can
be frustrating, but most of the time the situation resolves itself quickly. The
word comes back, and we continue. A study by Burke et al (1991) found that most
tip of the tongue states cured themselves spontaneously without too much
trouble.
In fact, younger
people seemed to be more agitated by the state, trying multiple active
strategies to force themselves to remember, while older people passively waited
for the word to come back.
It’s almost as if the
longer your lifetime experience with word-forgetting, the more you can relax
and trust that the word will pop-up eventually.
But word-forgetting
does cause older people a special kind of distress, because they worry more
about what it means about the health of
their memory.
While it is true that
some memory functions decline with age, tip of the tongue states are
independent of that decline.
In a study of
age-related increases of tip-of-the-tongue states, Salthouse & Mandell
(2013) found that “even though increased age is associated with lower levels of
episodic memory and with more frequent TOTs [tip of the tongue states], which
can be viewed as failures to access information from memory, the two phenomena
seem to be largely independent of one another.”
In other words, a
failure to remember a word need not be seen as a general memory problem. It is
just a failure to remember a word.
* * *
“Off Topic Verbosity” and other ways aging affects language
One issue that
studies have shown gets worse with age may challenge the evaluation of what
“worse” really means when it comes to language.
Our communicative goals change as we age. We have more to
reflect on, and more to impart.
“Off Topic Verbosity”
(OTV) is how researchers describe the practice of veering off topic while
speaking, adding irrelevant or extraneous details to a narration in progress.
OTV increases with age, but not for every type of conversation.
OTV does not affect
tasks of communicating factual content like describing a picture. It is when
subjects tell more personal, biographical information that OTV becomes a
problem.
Or maybe it’s not a
problem at all. Our communicative goals change as we age. We have more to
reflect on, and more to impart. If we grow to value the goal of sharing
experience over brevity and economy, the problem may not lie with the speaker,
but the listener.
It’s not going off
topic if the topic has changed.
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