Already at the End of the Tongue, But Not Even Remember. What phenomenon is this?

Medical Video: The Shocking Truth About the Gift of Speaking in Tongues

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You may have been trapped in this situation: someone asked you something that you clearly knew for sure. However, as soon as you forget what exactly, the one word you're looking for is that? All you remember is the original letters are S and consist of several syllables. You also remember it seems like there are letters E and R, but you can't clearly remember what words are actually ready to say on the tip of your tongue.

This is what is known as a phenomenon tip of the tongue, aka "tip of the tongue". Why did it happen?

The cause of the phenomenon tip-of-the-tongue or "on the tip of the tongue"

Tip-of-the-tongue is a feeling of confidence that someone knows a word, but fails to recall it (Schwartz, 1999, 2002). Failure to say a word occurs because someone is "blocked", "disturbed", and "prevented" from remembering a word. However, after a lot of new research emerged, failure to pronounce a word occurred because of someone's failure to recall the words they wanted to say. In some cases, this occurs due to interference at the inner stage lexical retrival, namely "the place" of word storage in human memory (Gollan & Brown, 2006).

This phenomenon is normal and common because according to conclusions from research that has been done, forgetting words that have been on the tip of the tongue occurs at least once a week in the daily life of a human (James & Burke, 2000; Schwartz, 2002). Gollan & Acenas (2004) and Golan et al. (2005) state that this phenomenon is more often experienced by the people bilingual aka people who master more than one language, because people who speak more than one language tend to know more words than people who only speak one language.

Research that has been done about phenomenatop-of-the-tongue

Roger Brown and David McNeill (1996) were the first researchers to conduct formal research on this subject. In his research, Brown and McNeill engineered the respondents to feel tip of the tongue. First of all, researchers give meaning from words that are rarely used in English (canoe, ambergris, nepotism) and ask the respondent to say which words are in accordance with the meanings that have been previously conveyed. Respondents immediately gave the correct answer, and there were also respondents who were sure that they had never heard the words.

Next, the researcher manipulates it tip-of-the-tongue. Respondents who previously knew the meaning of the words of each foreign word were asked to replace the foreign word in other words that had a similar pronunciation. Like when there is meaning from canoe given, respondents were asked to look for other words with similar pronunciation, such as saipan, Siam, Cheyenne, sarong, sanching, and symphoon.

As a result, respondents gave answers to other words that tended to be similar from the first foreign words they knew. As many as 49% in the study, respondents chose words with the first letter in common, and as many as 48% chose letters with many syllables that were the same as the first foreign words.

This explains that when you are hit with tip-of-the-tongue, You can identify the word you want to say. The traits that you think of, such as the first letter or number of syllables, tend to be correct with the letter you want to say. In addition, you also tend to replace those unthinkable words with other words that tend to be the same as pronunciation.

Gollan & Acenas (2004) and Golan & Brown (2006) also state that people who master more than one language sometimes replace the words they want to say in other languages that they master.

So…

As stated above, there is no need to be ashamed if you forget a word or name that is already on the tip of the tongue, because this phenomenon is normal in humans, even more common than the déjà vu phenomenon which is usually felt one to two times in someone's life (Brown, 2004). Keep open if you really know important terms, which you shouldn't say understand, but actually don't, agree?

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