Logo

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 hearing, 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 (Mass.) College. "Well, it turns out sign-language speakers have the same problem," she says. Only they are called "tip-of-the-finger" glitches, rather than "tip-of the tongue" by psychologists.

In a recent Cognition journal, Pyers and colleagues looked at bilingual sign-language speakers to try to get at the root of the tip-of-the-tongue problem.

Broadly speaking, 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 — 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 — competing," 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. "There are no sounds in sign language," Pyers says.

Most likely, the study concludes, bilingual folks only get to exercise the vocabulary of each language half as much as single language speakers, with correspondingly fewer chances to regularly use a word. "Memory is practice, in this case," Pyers says. Use it or lose it, folks, in other words, for your vocabulary.

But don't feel too bad for bilingual speakers. Pyers and other have shown that people who speak more than one language possess 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."

In other words, multiple language speakers possess 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 multi-tasking emails, 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." Turns out, you just have to practice paying attention, too.

At the root of a lot of the psychological investigation of speaking is the aim of figuring out how thinking works, a so-called " theory of mind," which explains how we come to understand other people's perspectives. Pyers, the child of two deaf parents, first looked at bilingual sign-language speakers in research on a deaf community in Nicaragua that started its own brand-new sign language three decades ago, in a bid to investigate this question.

Among the Nicaraguan signers, Pyers has shown that first and second generation speakers of the new sign language to test their "false belief" capabilities, the ability to reason what other people were thinking.

In these tests, often used to measure child development, people were typically shown a series of cartoons where two kids are playing with a teddy bear.