Strategies to resolve recall failures for proper names: New data

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.