The tip-of-the-tongue experience (TOT) is the phenomenological experience that a currently inaccessible word is stored in memory and will be retrieved. TOTsappear to be a universal experience that occurs frequently in everyday life, making the TOTan ideal case study in human phenomenology. This paper considers TOTsin light of Tulving's(1989)challenge to the doctrine of concordance, which is the assumption that behavior, cognition, and phenomenology are correlated, if not caused by identical processes. Psycholinguistic and memory theories, consistent with concordance, argue for direct access, or the view that TOTs and word retrieval are caused by the same retrieval processes. The metacognition view challenges concordance and views TOTsas an inference based on nontarget information that is accessible to rememberers. Current data, reviewed here, suggest that TOTsare caused via direct access and through inferential processes. Dissociations between TOTs and retrieval suggest that the causes of TOTphenomenology and the processes of retrieval are not identical.Perhaps the most famous and most quoted passage from William James's (1890) Principles of Psychology is his description of the tip-of-the-tongue experience (TOT). In the quote, repeated in many cognitive psychology textbooks and many papers on the TOT, James writes,The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term. [f wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit the mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. (p. 251) James's description is particularly vivid and accords with most people's intuitive experience with TOTs. James's view is based solely on his astute but informal observations of human thought. The description is so insightful and complete that it presages modern research on the topic.It was not until R. Brown and McNeill's 1966 paper on TOTs that empirical research on TOTs began. In a colorful description, Jones (1988) reported "Brown and MeNeill showed in their justly famous article that the TOT state, hitherto a feral beast that struck without warning, could be tamed and studied as a creature of conveniently The author thanks Alan Brown, Leslie Frazier, Janet Metcalfe, Waiter Mischel, Thomas O. Nelson, Endel Tulving, John Wixted, and several anonymous reviewers for insightful commentary and discussion on preliminary versions of this manuscript. The author also thanks all of the informants who contributed to the language survey. Correspondence should be addressed to B. L. Schwartz, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199 (e-mail: schwartb@fiu.edu). ...