ABSTRACT
In most arenas of our life, it is not our confidence or our potential that matters. Indeed, it has become almost a truism of modern society that it is results that count. For a professional athlete, it does not matter how well he or she performs in practice. It is performance in the big game that counts. Similarly, for a researcher, it is not the creativity of his or her ideas, but whether these ideas can be translated into published articles and funded grants. No less for our cognitive systems. Our TOTs are meaningless unless they really do tell us something about the retrieval process. In chapter 3, TOTs were discussed as heuristics; heuristics are only good when they are accurate predictors of the future. Therefore, in this chapter, I detour from my primary concern with the etiology, phenomenology, and function of TOTs. Here, I focus on the lexical retrieval process. In particular, I discuss how TOT research informs theories of lexical retrieval. Therefore, to paraphrase a famous president, let us ask not what TOTs are, but what they tell us about the cognitive processes that allows us to speak.
