History
The term "tip of the tongue" is borrowed from colloquial usage. The tip of the tongue phenomenon was first described as a psychological phenomenon in the text Principles of Psychology by William James (1890), although he did not label it as such.
Sigmund Freud also discussed unconscious psychological factors, such as unconscious thoughts and impulses that might cause forgetting familiar words.
The first empirical research on the tip of the tongue phenomenon was undertaken by Harvard researchers Roger Brown and David McNeill and published in 1966 in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. Brown and McNeill wanted to determine whether the feeling of imminent retrieval experienced in the tip of the tongue state was based on actual retrieval ability or was just an illusion.
In their study, Brown and McNeill read out the definitions of rare words to the study participants and asked them to name the object being defined, and the target word was later read by the experimenter. Participants were instructed to report whether they experienced a tip of the tongue state. Three types of positive TOT states were identified by Brown & McNeill: 1) the participant recognized the word read by the experimenter as the word he had been seeking, 2) the participant correctly recalled the word before it was read by the experimenter, and 3) subject recalled the word they were seeking before the target word was read by the experimenter, but the recalled word was not the intended target. If a participant indicated a tip of the tongue state, they were asked to provide any information about the target word they could recall. Brown and McNeill found that participants could identify the first letter of the target word, the number of syllables of the target word, words of similar sound, words of similar meaning, syllabic pattern, and the serial position of some letters in the target word better than would be expected by chance. Their findings demonstrated the legitimacy of the feeling of knowing experienced in a tip of the tongue state. This study was the foundation for subsequent research about tip of the tongue phenomenon.
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