The Variation of Tip-of-the-Tongue experiences in different word types

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim (Anglistisches Seminar), course: Language and Aging, language: English, abstract: 'What is it called?!' 'I know what you mean, it lies at the tip of my tongue...I just cannot think of it!' - Expressions like these are used quite frequently in our everyday lives. These so called Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences occur throughout all age bands, yet, older adults seem to experience them more often than younger adults do. But they also differ in various types of words: This phenomenon constitutes the basis of this research. Many previous studies investigating this topic focused on proper nouns as a word type, which is why the present study will focus on homonyms and polysemes in order to analyze if older adults perform differently in a picture naming and a question task between those two word types and also compared to younger adults. The anticipated findings are that older adults will have difficulties retrieving one word type compared to the other and also perform worse than the younger adults in both tasks overall. These results will show that word retrieval is therefore influence by the normal aging process.