PSY 369: Psycholinguistics Language Production: Speech Errors

Speech Errors -”Spoonerisms Reverend Dr. William Archibald Spooner, 1844-1930. Lecturer, tutor, and dean at Oxford university famous for speech errors Some famous examples: Nosey little cook FOR ... Cosy little nook Cattle ships and bruisers FOR ... Battle ships and cruisers ..we’ll have the hags flung out FOR ... ..we’ll have the flags hung out FOR ... .. you’ve wasted two terms you’ve tasted two worms” kisstomary to cuss the bride. FOR ... customary to kiss the bride

Speech errors Shift: one segment disappears from its appropriate location and appears somewhere else. The thing that shifts moves from one element to another of the same type ..in case she decide FOR ...in case she decides to hits it. to hit it

Speech errors Exchange: in effect double shifts, since 2 linguistic units change places You have hissed all my mystery lectures FOR .. You have missed all my history lectures your model renosed. FOR ..your nose remodelled.

Speech errors Anticipation: in anticipation of a forthcoming segment, we replace an earlier segment with the later segment It's a meal mystery FOR .. It's a real mystery ..bake my bike. FOR .. take my bike.

Speech errors Perseverance: an earlier segment replaces a later one (while also being articulated in its correct location) give the goy FOR .. give the boy ..he pulled a pantrum. FOR ..he pulled a tantrum.

Speech errors Addition: something is added to the target utterance I didn’t explain it clarefully enough FOR I didn’t explain it carefully enough.

Speech errors Blends: occur when more than one word is being considered, and the two blend into a single item didn’t bother me FOR didn’t bother me in the sleast. in the least/slightest.

Speech errors Deletion: something is omitted ..mutter intelligibly. FOR ..mutter unintelligibly.

Speech errors Substitutions (malapropisms): when one segment is replaced by an intruder, but this differs from the other types of errors since the intruder may not occur at all in the intended sentence “Jack” is the president FOR “Jack” is the subject of the sentence. of the sentence. I’m stuttering FOR I’m studying psycholinguistics. psycholinguistics.

Speech error regularities What can we learn from speech errors? Look for regularities in the patterns of errors Expand on this slide

Speech error regularities What can we learn from speech errors? If we look at the shift error “a maniac for weekends.” FOR “a weekend for maniacs.” From this we can infer that Speech is planned in advance. Accommodation to the phonological environment takes place (plural pronounced /z/ instead of /s/). Order of processing is Selection of morpheme  error  application of phonological rule

Speech error regularities What can we learn from speech errors? Stress exchange: econ 'om ists FOR e ’con omists From this we can infer that Stress may be independent and may simply move from one syllable to another (unlikely explanation). The exchange may be the result of competing plans resulting in a blend of e ’con omists and econ 'omics.

Speech error regularities What can we learn from speech errors? “bat a tog” FOR “pat a dog” Is this a double substitution (/b/ for /p/ and /t/ for /d/)? /p/ and /t/ are vocieless plosives and /b/ and /d/ voiced plosives Better analysed as a shift of the phonetic feature voicing. From this we can infer that Indicates that phonetic features are psychologically real - phonetic features must be units in speech production.

Speech error regularities What can we learn from speech errors? Consonant-vowel rule: consonants never exchange for vowels or vice versa Suggests that vowels and consonants are separate units in the planning of the phonological form of an utterance. Errors produce legal non-words. Suggests that we use phonological rules in production. Lexical bias effect: spontaneous (and experimentally induced) speech errors are more likely to result in real words than non-words. Grammaticality effect: elaborate here

Speech error regularities That speech is planned in advance - anticipation and exchange errors indicate speaker has a representation of more than one word. Substitutions indicate that the lexicon is organised phonologically and semantically. Substitutions appear to occur after syntactic organisation as substitutions are always from the same grammatical class (noun for noun, verb for verb etc.). External influences - situation and personality also influence speech production.

Problems with speech errors Not an on-line technique. We only remember (or notice) certain types of errors. People often don’t (notice or) write down errors which are corrected part way through the word, e.g. “wo..wring one”.

Problems with speech errors Evidence that we are not very good at perceiving speech errors. Even very carefully verified corpora of speech errors tend to list the error and then “the target”. However, there may be several possible targets. Saying there is one definitive target may limit conclusions about what type of error has actually occurred.

Problems with speech errors How well do we perceive speech errors? Ferber (1991) Method: transcripts of TV and radio were studied very carefully to pick out all the speech errors. The tapes were played to subjects whose task was to record all the errors they heard. The errors spotted by the subjects were compared with those that actually occurred. Results: subjects missed 50% of all the errors, and of the half they identified, 50% were incorrectly recorded (i.e. only 25% of speech errors were correctly recorded). Conclusion: we are bad at perceiving errors.

Experimental speech errors SLIP technique: speech error elicitation technique Motley and Baars, (1976)

Say the words silently as quickly as you can Say them aloud if you hear a tone

dog bone

dust ball

dead bug

doll bed

“darn bore” barn door

Experimental speech errors Some basic findings This technique has been found to elicit 30% of predicted spoonerisms. Findings: Spoonerism frequency affected by whether the error results in real words or nonwords “wrong loot” FOR “long root” more likely than “rawn loof” FOR “lawn roof “

Experimental speech errors Some basic findings Influence of semantics (Motley, 1980) Hypothesis: spoonerisms more likely if preceded by phonologically and semantically biasing material (PS) than only phonologically biasing material (P). Method: 2 matched lists of 264 word pairs, 20 word pairs as targets for spoonerisms (e.g. bad mug  mad bug) each preceded by 4 - 7 neutral “filler” word pairs, then 4 interference word pairs (2 phonological, e.g. mashed buns PLUS 2 semantic, e.g. angry insect - or semantically neutral controls).

Experimental speech errors Some basic findings Influence of semantics (Motley, 1980) Results: More spoonerisms in the SP condition than in the P condition. Conclusion: demonstrates that semantic interference may contribute to a distortion of the sound of a speaker’s intended utterance, possibly resulting in an utterance whose meaning is closer to that of the semantic interference than to that of the intended utterance.

SLIP - CONCLUSIONS Indicates that subjects consider the spoonerised version of the targets prior to articulation, and evaluate the corresponding phoneme sequence by applying the criterion of lexical legitimacy, by some kind of pre-articulatory editing process which employs at least 2 criteria: the phonotactic and lexical integrity of the phoneme sequence. Levelt’s monitoring stage.

Freudian slips The majority of psycholinguists assume that “the mechanics of slips can be studied linguistically without reference to their motivation.” (Boomer and Laver, 1968) BUT Freud held that speech errors “arise from the concurrent action - or perhaps rather, the opposing action - of two different intentions” Intended meaning + disturbing intention  speech error

Freudian slips E.g. “In the case of female genitals, in spite of many versuchungen [temptations] - I beg your pardon, versuche [experiments]…” From a politician “I like Heath. He’s tough - like Hitler - (shocked silence from reporters) - Did I say Hitler? I meant Churchill.” Are these cases of disturbing intentions or merely cases of lexical substitution (phonologically or semantically related words)?

Freudian slips Ellis, 1980, of the 94 errors listed in Psychopathology of Everyday Life 85 were made in normal speech. 51 (60%) involved lexical substitution in which the substituting word was either similar in phonological form (27) to the intended word or related in meaning (22). SO: “All but two of Freud’s lexical substitutions can, …, be classified as similar to the intended word in either form or meaning.”

Freudian slips Only 10/94 of the errors reported by Freud were spoonerisms, and 4 were from Meringer and Mayer, 1895 (an early, linguistically oriented study). E.g. Eiwess-scheibchen (“small slices of egg white”)  Eischeissweibchen (lit. “egg-shit-female”) Alabasterbüchse (“alabaster box”)  Alabüsterbachse (büste = breast) Hence, it appears that “Freud’s theory can be translated into the language of modern speech production models without excessive difficulty.” (Ellis, 1980).

Experimental Freudian slips? Hypothesis: Spoonerisms more likely when the resulting content is congruous with the situational context. Method: 90 males, same procedure previously used by Motley, 1980 (SLIP). 3 Conditions: “Electricity”, “Sex”, and Neutral.

car tires

cat toys

can tops

cup trays

“cool tits” tool kits

Experimental Freudian slips? Same word pairs in all conditions, spoonerism targets were non-words (e.g. goxi furl  foxy girl), targets preceded by 3 phonologically biasing word pairs not semantically related to target words.

Experimental Freudian slips? Results: Electricity set: 69 E, 31 S Sex set: 36 E, 76 S Neutral set: 44 E, 41 S Hence errors were in the expected direction. Conclusion: subjects’ speech encoding systems are sensitive to semantic influences from their situational cognitive set.

Experimental Freudian slips? Hypothesis: subjects with high levels of sex anxiety will make more “sex” spoonerisms than those with low sex anxiety. Method: 36 males selected on the basis of high, medium, & low sex anxiety (Mosher Sex-Guilt Inventory). SLIP task same as previous experiment but with 2 additional Sex targets and 9 Neutral targets.

Experimental Freudian slips? Results: looked at difference scores (Sex - Neutral) High sex anxiety > medium > low. Overall: Sex spoonerisms > Neutral spoonerisms. Conclusion: appears to support Freud’s view of sexual anxiety being revealed in Slips of the Tongue BUT: the experimenters (Baars and Motley) went on to show that any type of anxiety, not just sexual produced similar results. SO: anxiety was at play but it was more general, so the priming was more global.

Conclusions Speech errors have provided data about the units of speech production. By looking at the units involved in speech errors, we see that they closely reflect the those identified in the sub-disciplines of linguistics: Phonology - consonants, vowels, and consonant clusters (/fl/) can be disordered as units. Also, phonetic features. Syllables which have morphemic status can be involved in errors. Separation of stem morphemes from affixes (inflectional and derivational). Stress? Stress errors could be examples of blends..

Conclusions Speech errors have provided data about the units of speech production. By looking at the units involved in speech errors, we see that they closely reflect the those identified in the sub-disciplines of linguistics: Syntax -grammatical rules may be applied to the wrong unit, but produce the correct pronunciation (e.g. plural takes the correct form /s/, /z/, or /iz/. Indicates that these parts of words are marked as grammatical morphemes. Phrases (e.g. NP) and clauses can be exchanged or reversed. Words - can exchange, move, or be mis-selected.

FROM THOUGHT TO SPEECH How does a mental concept get turned into a spoken utterance? Levelt, 1989, 4 stages of production: Conceptualising: we conceptualise what we wish to communicate (“mentalese”). Formulating: we formulate what we want to say into a linguistic plan. Lexicalisation Lemma Selection Lexeme (or Phonological Form) Selection Syntactic Planning Articulating: we execute the plan through muscles in the vocal tract. Self-monitoring: we monitor our speech to assess whether it is what we intended to say, and how we intended to say it.

MODELS OF PRODUCTION As in comprehension, there are serial (modular) and interactive models Serial models - Garrett, Levelt et al. Interactive models - Stemberger, Dell Levelt’s monitoring stage (originally proposed by Baars) can explain much of the data that is said to favour interaction between earlier levels

An model of sentence production Three broad stages: Conceptualisation deciding on the message (= meaning to express) Formulation turning the message into linguistic representations Grammatical encoding (finding words and putting them together) Phonological encoding (finding sounds and putting them together) Articulation speaking (or writing or signing)