Classic accounts of lexical organization posit that humans are sensitive to environmental frequency, suggesting a mechanism for word learning based on repetition. However, a recent spate of evidence has revealed that it is not simply frequency but the diversity and distinctiveness of contexts in which a word occurs that drives lexical…

This study shows that the presence of a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state--the sense that a word is in memory when its retrieval fails--is used as a heuristic for inferring that an inaccessible word has characteristics that are consistent with greater word perceptibility. When reporting a TOT state, people judged an unretrieved word as more likely to…