The relation between syntactic and phonological knowledge in lexical access: evidence from the 'tip-of-the-tongue' phenomenon.

The relation between access to the syntactic and to the phonological features of words in lexical access is investigated in two experiments. Italian speakers were asked to provide the gender and partial phonological information of known nouns they could not produce at that moment, words that they felt were at the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT). In both experiments, subjects were able to provide information about the word they could not produce with better-than-chance accuracy. This was true not only for phonological information such as the initial phoneme of the word but also for the word's gender--a purely syntactic feature of nouns. However, analyses of the correlation between correct retrieval of the gender and the initial phoneme failed to reveal a positive relationship. This result is inconsistent with theories of lexical access the interpose two lexical nodes, lemma and lexeme nodes, between a word's semantic and phonological content. A model of lexical access that does not postulate the lemma/lexeme distinction is briefly discussed.