Tip-of-the-tongue and word retrieval deficits in dyslexia.

Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) responses on a picture-naming task were used to test the hypothesis that dyslexia involves phonological, but not semantic, processing deficits. Participants included 16 children with dyslexia and 31 control children between 8 and 10 years of age who did not differ in receptive vocabulary. As hypothesized, children with dyslexia demonstrated more TOTs and proportionally more errors in the phonological, but not semantic, step of word retrieval. Longer and low-frequency words also prompted more TOTs. The groups did not differ in phonological errors on a follow-up recognition task. The results provide evidence of text-independent, on-line phonological processing deficits in readers with dyslexia.