ABSTRACT
In the course of everyday conversation or casual introspection, words (or even streams of words) spring rapidly to mind. We are unconscious of the processes by which a particular word becomes conscious, or even of how it is spoken: word finding just happens to be a skill at which human adults are extraordinarily proficient (MacKay, 1987). In order to investigate this process that works so smoothly and effortlessly, cognitive psychologists have borrowed a strategy from other disciplines, such as engineering and neuropsychology, where light is shed on the workings of a system by studying its patterns of breakdown. What happens when the system does not work? It is evident that attempts to name do occasionally fail to produce the target word. Let us now consider the various ways in which such failures manifest themselves.
