tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

The everyday sense of this phrase is found in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, where the phenomenon is subjected to experimental investigation as part of a theory of SPEECH PRODUCTION. It is shown that people having a tip-of-the-tongue experience are able to recall certain general characteristics of the WORD, e.g. the number of SYLLABLES it has, or its STRESS pattern; also some PHONETIC SEGMENTS are recalled more readily than others. These results suggest that words vary in the ACCESSibility of their PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION in the brain, and that certain features of word structure are stored independently of others. Lexical access is being triggered by a SEMANTIC cue, but the access code that is used to retrieve the word contains certain pieces of formal information that help us to find it.