A Study On The Aging Mechanism Of The Tongue Tip Phenomenon In Speech Production

The tip of the tongue phenomenon(TOT),as a typical phenomenon of difficulty in speech production,has also been investigated by researchers for its aging mechanism.Previous studies have investigated different factors that may affect the aging of TOT,but the results are controversial.Some studies have shown that the general inhibitory ability will affect the aging of TOT,while others believe that the phonological and semantic a retrieval ability will affect the aging of TOT,proposing the corresponding Inhibition Deficit Hypothesis and Transmission Deficit Hypothesis.It is still controversial whether the type of noun affect the aging of TOT.Therefore,this study aims to control the general inhibitory ability,and to investigate the effect of the type of noun on the aging of TOT through the picture naming task,and to explore whether phonological priming or semantic priming affect the aging of TOT.Experiment 1 included 20 young adults and 20 healthy elderly adults.Based on the picture naming paradigm,the proportion of TOT,phonological retrieval deficits and semantic retrieval deficits of proper nouns and common nouns were compared to explore whether the type of noun had an impact on the aging of TOT and whether the aging effect existed in phonological retrieval and semantic retrieval.In Experiment 2,another group of participants was participated.Through picture naming and primes task,we investigated the proportion of TOT,phonological retrieval deficits and semantic retrieval deficits in different primes,and explored whether primes had an effect on TOT aging,phonological or semantic retrieval.Experiment 1 showed that TOT had aging effect.The interaction between age and the type of noun is not significant,suggesting that the type of noun is not the main factor affecting TOT aging.Older adults have greater semantic retrieval and speech retrieval deficits than younger adults,suggesting that semantic retrieval and speech retrieval have aging effects.Experiment 2 showed that the interaction between age and phonology was significant.The proportion of TOT in both the young and the elderly was significantly higher than that in the phonological-related primes,and the phonological priming in the elderly was greater than that in the young.This indicates that phonological priming affects the aging effect of TOT and reduces the proportion of TOT.For common nouns,the proportion of TOT in the elderly was significantly higher than that in the young in semantic-unrelated primes,but no significant difference was found in the semanticrelated primes.For common nouns,the proportion of TOT in the semantic-related primes is higher than that in semantic-unrelated primes.There is almost no significant difference between the proportion of TOT in the young and the elderly in the semantic primes,and the proportion of TOT in the semantic-related primes increase.This indicates that semantic priming affects the TOT aging effect of common nouns and increases the proportion of TOT in proper nouns of the elderly.For the young,in terms of proper nouns,the proportion of phonological retrieval deficits in both semanticrelated and semantic-unrelated primes was higher than that in phonological-unrelated primes.For the elderly,in terms of proper nouns,the proportion of phonological retrieval deficits in phonological-unrelated primes was higher than that of phonological-related primes in the semantic-unrelated primes.For the elderly,in the semantic-unrelated primes,the proportion of phonological-unrelated primes was higher than that in the phonological-related primes.For the young,in the semantic-related primes,the proportion of semantic retrieval deficits in phonological-unrelated primes was significantly higher in the phonological-related in proper nouns.For the elderly,in the common nouns and semantic-related primes,the proportion of semantic retrieval deficits in phonological-unrelated primes was significantly higher than that in the phonological-related primes This indicates that semantic priming hinders phonological retrieval while phonological priming promotes semantic retrieval under certain conditions.In this study,we found that the type of noun is not the main factor affecting the TOT aging effect,while phonological priming significantly reduced the incidence of TOT in the elderly,while semantic priming increased the proportion of TOT in common nouns in the young.The activation of phonological and semantic nodes has different effects on different levels of transmission: semantic priming hinders phonological retrieval,while phonological priming promotes semantic retrieval under certain conditions,which generally supports the Transmission Deficit Hypothesis.