On the way from the first thought to the spo­ken word, not every­thing al­ways runs smooth­ly. From time to time, there are er­rors in the thought process or slips of the tongue. Then we get mud­dled up and mix up in­di­vid­ual let­ters or en­tire words. From time to time, how­ev­er, our speech pro­duc­tion fails even when we re­call knowl­edge, so that a cer­tain word just doesn’t come to mind. It is lit­er­al­ly “on the tip of our tongue”.

We know the word quite well and can even de­scribe or para­phrase it. This of­ten oc­curs with names, for ex­am­ple, that it has two syl­la­bles and be­gins with a B. On­ly the rest of the name does not come to our mind, so that we sub­jec­tive­ly think that the word is on the tip of our tongue and on­ly needs to make a lit­tle honk. So : Where ex­act­ly is the prob­lem in such moments ?

To an­swer this ques­tion, we need to un­der­stand the struc­ture of men­tal mem­o­ry – the col­lo­qui­al term for our long-term mem­o­ry, be­cause it con­tains all the lin­guis­tic knowl­edge of our ex­pe­ri­ences. It com­pris­es dif­fer­ent lev­els : On the for­mal lev­el, for ex­am­ple, the writ­ten im­age and the sound of each word are an­chored ; on the se­man­tic lev­el, in turn, its mean­ing and com­bin­abil­i­ty with oth­er words are an­chored. Be­cause our men­tal-cog­ni­tive process is not on­ly lin­guis­tic in na­ture, there is an­oth­er lev­el that is added. This links the two pre­vi­ous­ly de­scribed lev­els with smells, im­ages, pre­vi­ous­ly lived ex­pe­ri­ences, au­di­to­ry im­pres­sions and emo­tions with this very word. This is where every­thing we know about our neigh­bor, for ex­am­ple, is an­chored. In or­der to ex­press a thought in lan­guage, this con­nec­tion be­tween form, se­man­tics and knowl­edge must be ac­ti­vat­ed. Then the search for en­tries (sim­i­lar to the al­go­rithm in search en­gines) be­gins in the long-term mem­o­ry, whose mean­ing match­es the knowl­edge. Fi­nal­ly, the search for the form, with the name of the neigh­bor, takes place.

Even if we don’t im­me­di­ate­ly come up with the word or name, we can of­ten in­di­cate what “gen­der” the word we are look­ing for is and that it is a job ti­tle. This sug­gests that ac­cess to knowl­edge does work, be­cause in­for­ma­tion such as the gram­mat­i­cal gen­der of a word is stored here. In ad­di­tion, it re­veals that a sim­i­lar sound­ing word (be­cause it dif­fers on­ly in one let­ter, for ex­am­ple) has a sup­port­ive ef­fect in com­ing up with the searched word. This there­fore shows that it is a mat­ter of a dis­tur­bance of the form lev­el. More­over, a sub­stan­tial third of the in­di­vid­u­als have a dis­or­der in de­ter­min­ing the gram­mat­i­cal gender.

Tak­en to­geth­er, this means that a word that is on the tip of your tongue is on­ly in­com­plete­ly ac­ti­vat­ed on one or more lev­els. That is why we some­times know what it rhymes with or on which syl­la­ble it is stressed, but the co­her­ent con­nec­tion and thus the shape of the word is in­com­plete. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, there are no sure tech­niques how to avoid such dis­tur­bances, be­cause in every­day life there is no jour­ney­man ready to help you with tips. Per­haps it may help one here to say aloud all those words that one can ex­clude. That way you can men­tal­ly put them aside. But even that may not al­ways help.

So the next time you can’t think of a word (right away): that hap­pens to every­one and is per­fect­ly nor­mal. The phe­nom­e­non is preva­lent all over the world. Ac­cord­ing av­er­ages, we get stuck like this once a week.