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

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.