The tip-of-the-Mandarin tongue: phonological and orthographic priming of TOT resolution in Mandarin speakers

ABSTRACT

Studies of tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences in English have shown that priming the TOT’s first syllable, especially a low-frequency one, helps to resolve the TOT. We explored whether priming of TOT resolution occurs in Mandarin, a language whose visual representation (orthography) is largely independent of sound (phonology). Participants saw descriptions corresponding to cheng-yu targets, four-character Chinese idioms. After a TOT, they saw a list of words where one was sometimes a phonological (Experiment 1) or orthographic (Experiment 2) prime. Phonological primes had a first character different from the target’s but contained either its first syllable or first phoneme, whereas orthographic primes contained the target’s first radical. Results showed that two factors marginally increased TOT resolution: first syllable primes and higher-frequency first radicals. These results are discussed in terms of a transmission deficit model of TOTs in Mandarin where priming of TOT resolution has both similarities and differences with alphabetic languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT)
• Mandarin
• phonological and orthographic priming
• syllable and radical frequency
• idioms

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by 2019 Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) awards and 2020 Remote Alternative Independent Summer Experience (RAISE) Program awards from Pomona College to Chang and Hu. This research was presented at the 61st annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society. We thank Shenghua Luan and Taomei Guo for providing testing equipment and helping with participant recruitment in Beijing, China. We thank Yingying Hou for helping with participant recruitment in Shanghai, China.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/bqv9g/. None of the experiments were preregistered.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Three first syllable primes and three first phoneme primes did not have the exact same tone as the target. However, excluding stimuli with tonal differences had no effect on the results.

2 Item analyses were not conducted because the target items were not randomly selected, which can make these analyses inappropriate (Vitevitch & Sommers, 2003) and less powerful. Proportionally more targets are excluded from analysis because TOTs may not occur in every prime condition for a target. Furthermore, participants have TOTs on different subsets of targets, so the by-participant analysis functionally includes item variability.

3 It is important to note that a radical can appear at different spatial locations in constituting different characters. However, since our experimental stimuli focused exclusively on a single kind of spatial configuration of character, i.e. left-right structure, and we were interested in how orthography affects TOTs, we did not represent spatial configuration of radicals in our Transmission Deficit model.