Access to semantic and phonological representations in young and older adults: A tip-of-the-tongue study

The aim of this study was to investigate separate age-related changes in the access to semantic and phonological representations during tip-of-the-tongue (ToT) states. Young versus older adults, matched for vocabulary level, performed an experimental induction task of ToT states. Ninety-five noun definitions, that were pre-tested in order to build a material suitable for both age groups, were presented in a random order. A two-step analysis of the results shows that the word retrieval failure probability was less important for the older adults than for the younger ones for the semantic step, while the opposite was observed for the phonological step. This important dissociation is interpreted within the framework of a model of activation transmission. (C) 2012 Societe francaise de psychologie. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.