Table of contents:
- The cause of the phenomenon tip-of-the-tongue or "on the tip of the tongue"
- Research that has been done about phenomenatop-of-the-tongue
- So…
You may have been caught in this situation: someone has asked you something you know for sure. However, all of a sudden you forget what, in fact, that one word you were looking for? All you remember is that the initial letter is an S and consists of several syllables. You also remember that there seemed to be the letters E and R, but you could not clearly remember what words were actually already 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 remember it (Schwartz, 1999, 2002). This failure to pronounce a word occurs because a person is "prevented", "bullied", and "prevented" from remembering a word. However, after many new studies that have appeared, failure to pronounce a word occurs because of a person's failure to recall the word he wanted to say. In some cases, this occurs as a result of disturbances at the inner stage lexical retrival, namely the "place" storing words in human memory (Gollan & Brown, 2006).
This phenomenon is normal and common because according to the conclusions of research that has been done, forgetting a word that is already on the tip of the tongue occurs at least once a week in a person's daily life (James & Burke, 2000; Schwartz, 2002). Gollan & Acenas (2004) and Golan et al. (2005) stated that this phenomenon is more often experienced by para bilingual aka people who speak 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 their research, Brown and McNeill engineered their respondents to feel tip of the tongue. First of all, the researcher gives the meaning of a word that is rarely used in English (canoe, ambergris, nepotism) and ask the respondent to state which word corresponds to the meaning previously conveyed. Respondents immediately gave the correct answer, and some respondents believed that they had never heard these words.
Furthermore, researchers engineered the existence tip-of-the-tongue. Respondents who previously knew the meaning of each foreign word were asked to replace the foreign word with another word that had a similar pronunciation. As when there is a meaning from canoe given, the respondent is asked to look for other words with similar pronunciations, such as saipan, Siam, Cheyenne, sarong, sanching, and symphoon.
As a result, respondents provide answers to other words that tend to be similar to the first foreign word they know. As much as 49% in this research, respondents chose words with the same first letter, and as many as 48% chose letters with the same many syllables as the first foreign word.
This explains that when you are struck with tip-of-the-tongue, You can identify the word you want to say. Traits that come to your mind, such as the first letter or number of syllables, are likely to be correct with the letter you are trying to pronounce. In addition, you also tend to replace the unthinkable word with another word that tends to be pronounced the same.
Gollan & Acenas (2004) and Golan & Brown (2006) also stated that people who master more than one language sometimes substitute the word they want to say into another language that they are good at.
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 often than the phenomenon of déjà vu which is usually felt only one to two times a day. one's life (Brown, 2004). Stay open if you actually know important terms, what shouldn't be saying understand, but really don't, agree?