Rarity is keyĪs with previous experiments, monolinguals had fewer tip-of-the-tongue experiences than bilinguals, about 7 words versus 12, out of a total of 52 – though Pyers’ team counted only instances where the volunteer knew the word. The viewed objects – which included axes, weathervanes, gyroscopes, nooses and metronomes – were obscure enough to elicit tip-of-the-tongue experiences in all but one participant. To provoke tip-of-the-tongue moments, the researchers showed the bilinguals, as well as a control group of 22 English monolinguals, pictures of dozens of different objects and challenged the volunteers to name them in 30 seconds. Since the signers’ second “tongue” makes no use of sound, there is no opportunity for sound-alike words to elicit tip-of-the-tongue experiences, says Pyers, who is fluent in ASL. In hopes of narrowing down these explanations, Pyers’ team compared 11 Spanish-English bilinguals with 22 people who used English and American sign language (ASL).
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