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Age-Dependent Shifts in Functional Correlates of the Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Yu Fang¹ (), Wen Wen¹, Chengyang Lin¹, Senthil Palanivelu¹, Robert M. G. Reinhart¹; ¹Boston University

Imagine pausing mid-sentence as a familiar word lingers just out of reach—its meaning vivid, its sound inaccessible. The Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) phenomenon is classically attributed to weakened transmission between semantic and phonological nodes, yet the dominant source of this transmission failure may evolve with age. Here, we ask whether the principal systems underlying ToT differ across the adult lifespan, integrating behavioral and resting-state magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from the CamCAN dataset. Behaviorally, we derived motor- and memory-related indices from a battery of cognitive measures using principal component analysis and examined their relationships with individuals’ ToT ratios across age. The two components exhibited dissociable trajectories: motor factors predicted ToT frequency more strongly in younger adults, whereas mnemonic factors increasingly dominated with age. At the neural level, we computed power-envelope correlation matrices across multiple frequency bands and identified nodes showing reliable correlations with ToT ratios that recurred across leave-one-out iterations. Nodes within motor and memory networks revealed frequency-specific associations with ToT ratios that differed across age groups, suggesting distinct frequency bases for their contributions to word retrieval. Together, these results indicate that the Tip-of-the-Tongue phenomenon is associated with different functional networks across adulthood: ToT variance covaries with motor–phonological network measures in younger adults and with memory-related network measures in older adults. These associations exhibit distinct frequency profiles, suggesting age-dependent shifts in the neural correlates of semantic-to-phonological transmission.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Development & aging