Efectos del envejecimiento en el fenómeno de la punta de la lengua. Sugerencias para la intervención en el acceso al léxico

The main important difficulty of lexical access for the elderly consists in a failure to recall a word of which one has knowledge that has been called «the tip-ofthe- tongue phenomenon» (TOT). That failure has negative consequences on the normal flow of conversation and communication and can produce emotional disturbances in the elderly. We carried out an experimental study on the influence of aging on incidence and resolution of TOT events with the aim of knowing some guide lines for intervention that can help aged people to successfully resolve these situations. In this study, 57 adults grouped into three groups of age (young, middle age, old) participated in an experiment using definitions about common names, proper names, adjectives and verbs to elicit TOTs. They also were induced to resolve the TOTs introducing a freeevocation- of words task and a priming task presented as a fluency and a pronunciation task respectively. Results confirm a higher incidence of TOTs and a lower effect of phonological priming on the older than on the younger people. From our results we suggest that the more efficacious strategies to facilitate lexical access in the elderly are those that are based on a conscious and top-down processing without temporal constraints and implemented by tasks using contextual and semantic cues.