On the tip of your tongue, that word you can't dig out. Why not?
The tip of your tongue may be the wrong place to look, psychologists suggest. They find that deaf sign-language speakers may hold the keys to finding where those words are hiding.
"You know the word, you just can't get it out," says Jennie Pyers of Wellesley College. "Well, it turns out sign-language speakers have the same problem." Only they are called "tip-of-the-finger" glitches rather than "tip-of-the-tongue" by psychologists.
In a recent edition of the journal Cognition, Pyers and colleagues looked at bilingual sign-language speakers to try to get at the root of the tip-of-the-tongue problem.
There are two theories about where tip-of-the-tongue words hide out. First, sound-alike words may clash with one another in your head -- "municipal" and "munificent," say -- fighting each other as the right one struggles to get out. Or second, the problem may simply be your lousy memory, tripping you up when you use a rarely recalled word.
"Bilingual folks have the problem even worse," Pyers says. In the study, English-only speakers, shown pictures of 52 rarely recalled things (such as a metronome), averaged about seven tip-of-the-tongue glitches. But English-Spanish bilinguals did worse, averaging 12 glitches. "So, it could be that they have more competing sounds -- 'popsicle' in English against papalote (kite) in Spanish," Pyers says.
But the interesting part came when they looked at bilingual sign-language speakers. They averaged the same numbers of glitches, 12, as spoken-language bilinguals, even though "there are no sounds in sign language," Pyers says.
Most likely, the study concludes, bilinguals exercise the vocabulary of each language only half as much as single-language speakers, with correspondingly fewer chances to use a word regularly. "Memory is practice, in this case," Pyers says. Use it or lose it, in other words, for your vocabulary.
But don't feel too bad for bilingual speakers. Pyers and others have shown that people who speak more than one language have advantages that make a difference beyond just fluency in another tongue. In the current Cognition, for example, a study led by Albert Costa of Spain's Universitat Pompeu Fabra finds that "when the task at hand recruits a good deal of monitoring resources, bilinguals outperform monolinguals."
That means multiple-language speakers have a better attention span for hard tasks. And they seem to be better at switching their focus from one task to the next, a real advantage in our era of multitasking e-mail, cellphones and occupations.
"The explanation is that they practice controlling their languages, repressing one at the expense of the other, constantly," Pyers says. "So they are just better at controlling their focus."
In other words, you have to practice paying attention, too.
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