Disfluency manifestations of lexical retrieval failures during the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon in “The tonight show starring Jimmy Fallon”

The current study examines speech disfluency features associated with the Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT) state in spontaneous conversation from “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”. It integrates Lickley’s (2015) disfluency marker framework, Willem Levelt’s (1989) theory of speech production, and a metacognitive approach (Schwartz & Metcalfe, 2011) to identify disfluency features and explain the cognitive processes underlying difficulties in lexical access. The research uses a qualitative descriptive approach. The data source is 20 cases of spontaneous speech transcription taken from 5 YouTube videos. The results reveal four main features of disfluency: hesitation, filled pause, self-repair and repetition. For cognitive classification, Non-TOT cases were much more frequent (17 cases) than Moderate TOT (2 cases) and Strong TOT (1 case). In addition, the study shows that the failure to retrieve a lexical item is modulated by the interaction of two metacognitive functions: monitoring (to detect memory blocks) and control (to enact compensatory strategies). These findings highlight that disfluencies are not merely the result of lexical memory failure, rather they serve adaptive functions such as speech planning strategies, maintaining the conversational floor and demonstrating active metacognitive regulation during spontaneous conversation.