关键词: 舌尖现象, 老化机制, 传递不足理论, 抑制不足理论, 知识增长理论

Abstract: The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) is the most common dilemma of speech error in older peoples daily life, which will trigger negative influence on their social communication. The transmission deficit theory proposes that the connection between the semantic and phonological systems gets weak with aging, and the semantic information will become more and more difficult to transmit to the phonological system completely, resulting in the inaccessible of the speech. However, this model does not expound the concrete mechanism. The inhibition deficit theory suggests TOT is closely related to the age-related decline in inhibiting irrelevant information, but we could find little direct experimental evidence to support this hypothesis. Incremental-knowledge theory provides a new perspective to explain the reason of TOT aging. Future research need to focus on the underlying aging mechanism of TOT, so as to provide more effective intervention to resolve the social communication dilemma in older adults.

Key words: the tip-of-the-tongue, aging mechanism, transmission deficit theory, inhibition deficit theory, incremental-knowledge theory