Retrieval of lexical-syntactic features in tip-of-the-tongue states

Italian speakers who signaled that they were in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state were asked to recognize the grammatical gender and the initial and the final phonemes of the unavailable word. The proportions of gender and phoneme hits that occurred with "don't know" (DK) responses were adopted as baselines for chance-level performance. Participants were more accurate in recognizing the grammatical gender and the initial but not the final phoneme of target words when they were in TOT than in DK states. The availability of gender in TOT states suggests the independence of syntactic from phonological information in lexical access. However, the retrieval of gender was far from perfect for TOT words, and it was no better than recognition of the initial phoneme. These results are problematic for the notion that the selection of a lemma is synonymous with the retrieval of the word's syntactic features. The implications of these results for the distinction between lemma and lexeme levels of representation in lexical access are discussed.