Lexical knowledge and lexical retrieval in ageing: Insights from a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) study

Elderly people experience more failures in word form access (tip-of-the-tongue events, ‘TOTs’) than young people. There is general agreement that TOTs are signs of cognitive decline in older people, but because of the diversity and ambiguity involved in measuring TOTs, certain questions regarding age-related trends in semantic access remain unsolved. Age-related increases in vocabulary may raise the level of efficiency of access to semantic representations and compensate for lexical access failures. We explore the relationships between lexical knowledge and lexical retrieval in ageing by re-examining the data obtained by Juncos-Rabadán et al. on TOTs induced in 140 volunteers aged from 19 to 82 years. We found that older adults displayed significantly more difficulty in accessing the phonological representations of personal names, but not those of common nouns. The results revealed greater semantic access efficiency in older participants. We discuss the findings in light of the transmission deficit theory of TOT production.