Naming difficulties in adolescents with dyslexia: Application of the tip-of-the-tongue paradigm

The present study used the “tip-of-the-tongue” (TOT) experimental paradigm in a picture-naming task to explore the naming deficits of adolescents with dyslexia. As compared with a control group of typically developing readers, the adolescents with dyslexia had fewer correct responses and more TOT responses. When they failed to retrieve a target word, the adolescents with dyslexia had more phonological substitutions and benefited less from a phonological cue. However, both groups did not differ in the amount of semantic substitutions and supplied the same amount and kind of partial semantic information on the missing target word. These findings suggest that adolescents with dyslexia have significant naming difficulties that seem to arise because of difficulty in accessing the phonological word forms after the corresponding abstract lexical representation has been successfully accessed.