Naming difficulties in language-disabled children: Preliminary findings with the application of the tip-of-the-tongue paradigm

The 'tip of the tongue' (TOT) paradigm in a picture-naming task was presented to 14 children with language disabilities (LD) and 14 children without language disabilities (ND). Although the two groups did not differ in the semantic information they had on words they could not fully retrieve, the LD children had less valid and more invalid phonological information. They also had fewer correct responses and spontaneous recalls, more 'Don't Know's (DK) and TOTs, and less accurate 'feeling of knowing' (FOK) judgments. These results, demonstrating dissociation between the semantic and phonological levels of word representation, support a two-stage model of word retrieval. These findings are evidence in favor of a phonological treatment approach for naming problems in LD children.