When a word cannot be assigned a meaning and the shape must be expressed but the shape cannot be brought to mind from memory, it can lead to the "top word phenomenon".
- to check the correct selection of a particular word in the given situation.
Here we may see the approximate word usage, which can be hampered by the absence of the corresponding word in processing memory or in the mental storage.
An element may have an unpredictable change of form in certain grammatical contexts or may refer to other words in sentences in idiosyncratic ways; it is important to provide students with this information as we teach the basic form.
For example, when we learn a new verb, we can also model its past tense, if it is irregular (go, go), and we can notice whether it is transitive or intransitive.
