Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2024 Jan;52(1):197-210. doi: 10.3758/s13421-023-01455-x. Epub 2023 Sep 18.
Proper names are especially prone to retrieval failures and tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs)-a phenomenon wherein a person has a strong feeling of knowing a word but cannot retrieve it. Current research provides mixed evidence regarding whether related names facilitate or compete with target-name retrieval. We examined this question in two experiments using a novel paradigm where participants either read a prime name aloud (Experiment 1) or classified a written prime name as famous or non-famous (Experiment 2) prior to naming a celebrity picture. Successful retrievals decreased with increasing trial number (and was dependent on the number of previously presented similar famous people) in both experiments, revealing a form of accumulating interference between multiple famous names. However, trial number had no effect on TOTs, and within each trial famous prime names increased TOTs only in Experiment 2. These results can be explained within a framework that assumes competition for selection at the point of lexical retrieval, such that successful retrievals decrease after successive retrievals of proper names of depicted faces of semantically similar people. By contrast, the effects of written prime words only occur when prime names are sufficiently processed, and do not provide evidence for competition but may reflect improved retrieval relative to a "don't know" response.
专有名词特别容易出现检索失败和舌尖状态（TOT）——即一个人对一个词有一种强烈的感觉，但却无法检索到它。目前的研究对于相关名称是促进还是竞争目标名称检索提供了混合证据。我们在两个实验中使用了一种新的范式来检验这个问题，在这个范式中，参与者要么大声朗读一个启动名（实验 1），要么在命名名人照片之前将一个书面启动名分类为著名或非著名（实验 2）。在两个实验中，随着试验次数的增加（并且依赖于之前呈现的相似名人的数量），成功的检索次数减少，这揭示了在多个著名名字之间存在一种积累干扰的形式。然而，试验次数对 TOT 没有影响，并且在每个试验中，著名的启动名仅在实验 2 中增加了 TOT。这些结果可以用一种假设在词汇检索点进行选择竞争的框架来解释，即成功检索的次数会在连续检索语义相似的人所描绘的面孔的专有名词后减少。相比之下，书面启动词的影响仅在启动名得到充分处理时才会出现，并且不会提供竞争的证据，但可能反映了相对于“不知道”反应的改进检索。
