Personal names are particularly susceptible to retrieval failures. Studies describing people's spontaneous strategies for resolving such failures have indicated that people frequently search for semantic or contextual information about the target person. However, previous experimental studies have shown that, while providing phonological information may help resolve a name-recall failure, by contrast, providing semantic information is usually not helpful. In the first study, in order to reduce a bias present in previous studies of spontaneous strategies, explicit instructions were given to participants, specifying that the focus of the study was on a voluntary search for information. Participants reported strategically searching for semantic/contextual strategies when they tried to resolve a name-retrieval failure more often than they reported searching for phonological/orthographic information. In addition, phonological/orthographic strategies were perceived as more difficult than semantic/contextual strategies. In a second experiment, we investigated whether retrieving phonological information by oneself is objectively difficult in a face-naming task: in the event of retrieval failure, participants were instructed to search for phonological information in some trials and for semantic information in other trials. Participants recalled semantic information in 94% of the trials when instructed to search for semantic information. By contrast, when instructed to search for phonological information, participants remained unable to recall any correct piece of phonological information in about 55% of the trials. This result shows that the retrieval of phonological information is objectively difficult. This difficulty could explain why people do not privilege searching for phonology to resolve name-retrieval failures.
Keywords: Metacognition; Proper names; Tip-of-the-tongue.