First learned words are not forgotten: Age-of-acquisition effects in the tip-of-the-tongue experience

A large body of evidence indicates that the age at which a word is acquired predicts the time required to retrieve that word during speech production. Here we explored whether age of acquisition also predicts the experience of being unable to produce a known word at a particular moment. Italian speakers named a sequence of pictures in Experiment 1 or retrieved a word as a response to a definition in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the participants were instructed to indicate when they were in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state. Generalized mixed-effects models performed on the TOT and correct responses revealed that word frequency and age of acquisition predicted the TOT states. Specifically, low-frequency words elicited more TOTs than did high-frequency words, replicating previous findings. In addition, late-acquired words elicited more TOTs than did early-acquired words. Further analyses revealed that the age of acquisition was a better predictor of TOTs than was word frequency. The effects of age of acquisition were similar with subjective and objective measures of age of acquisition, and persisted when several psycholinguistic variables were taken into consideration as predictors in the generalized mixed-effects models. We explained these results in terms of weaker semantic-to-phonological connections in the speech production system for late-acquired words.