Homework 3 (Due in 1 week) Try to be vigilant for four or five days in noting speech errors
made by yourself and others. Write each slip down (carry a small notebook and pencil with you). Then, when you have accumulated a reasonably size sample (aim for 20 to 30, but don't panic if you don't get that many), try to classify each slip in terms of
the unit(s) involved the type of error
Remember that each error may be interpreted in different ways. For some of them, see if you can come up with more than one possibility.
Discourse in memory Kintsch and colleagues (1990)
Jack scanned the newspaper.Jack looked through the newspaper.Jack looked through the movie ads.Jack looked over some editorials.
It was Friday night and Jack and Melissa were bored, so they decided to catch a movie. Jack scanned the newspaper. He saw that they could just make the nine o’clock showing of the hot new romantic comedy. Off they went.
Did this sentence occur in the paragraph?
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Trace strength
SituationalmodelTextbase
Surface form
Some of the big questions
“the horse raced past the barn”
Production forms half of language ability: Input to comprehension More difficult problem than comprehension?
Developmental lag Learning a second language
What we don’t do
Dr. C: How much money is there in my current account and in my deposit account?
<SILENCE>Dr. C: Hello?
<SILENCE>Computer: Colourless green ideas sleeeeeep furiously.Dr. C: How much money is there in my current account and in my deposit account?
<SILENCE>Computer: Your current a-ccount encompasses two hundred dollars. I cannot access how..<SILENCE>.. in your deposit account money much is there.
Undesirable features Meaningless and irrelevant content. Long silences, strange pausing. Infelicities of vocabulary and structure:
‘Your current account encompasses $200’ ‘I cannot access how in your deposit account money much is
there.’ Strange intonation and pronunciation:
‘Your current a-ccount’ ‘Sleeeeeep’
What we do do
Expressing non-ordered conceptual message via ordered array of sounds. Start with a message (idea) and partition it,
sequence it, and articulate it Speakers must produce utterances with:
Appropriate meaningful content, lexical items, syntax, & pronunciation, intonation, and phrasing.
And they must do this fluently, in real time.
Getting the form right
Hearers: Details of form can sometimes (often?) be ignored
(e.g. missing words, not paying attention).
Speakers: Have to get every aspect of the form right,
whether or not germane to message.
Getting the content wrong
Paradox: Adept at getting form right but content wrong:
Subject-verb agreement errors
The report about the fires are very long Less than 5% errors in experiment designed to elicit
them (Bock & Miller 1991).
Getting the content wrong
Paradox: Adept at getting form right but content wrong:
Serious structural anomalies (unparseable)
I cannot access how in your deposit account money much is there.
0.5% utterances (Deese 1984).
Getting the content wrong
Paradox: Adept at getting form right but content wrong:
Sound/word errors
Can you put the desk back on my book when you’ve finished with it?It’ll get fast a lot hotter if you put the burner on.
Garnham et al 1982: Sound errors 3.2/10,000 words Word errors 5.1/10,000 words
Methodologies Production is intrinsically more difficult
subject to study than language comprehension Not susceptible to experimental study?
Yes it is, but requires careful and clever methods
Historically: observational methods Recently: experimental methods
What’s the problem?
Comprehension: Can control input precisely Moving from language to conceptual representation
Production: How do we control input? Moving from (unobservable) conceptual representation to
language
BUT: end product is observable in production but not comprehension
Common Measures
What people say: Under which circumstances do they produce
particular words, utterances etc May be intended, or may be errors How frequently do they do this
Time course: How quickly do people produce language
Neurophysiological: How is language production represented in the
brain?
Naturally occurring speech
Fluent speech: Sentence types, verb forms, prosodic markers, etc
(Deese, 1984) Distribution of extraposed structures (Arnold, Wasow,
Losongco & Ginstrom, 2000) Distribution of thuh vs thee (Clark & Fox-Tree, 1997)
Distribution of reduced phonological forms (Bard et al., 2001)
Methodologies: Observational
Naturally occurring speech
Disfluent speech: Scope of utterance planning (Ford & Holmes, 1978;
Beattie, 1983) Error detection and correction (Levelt, 1983)
Methodologies: Observational
Naturally occurring speech errors
"The law I sign today directs new funds and new focus to the task of collecting vital intelligence on terrorist threats and on weapons of mass production.” George W. Bush
"There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again." George W. Bush
"For seven and a half years I've worked alongside President Reagan.We've had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We've had some sex ... uh...setbacks.” George Bush Sr.
Methodologies: Observational
Experimental approaches Not prey to same problems as observational
studies: Reduces observer bias Isolates phenomenon of interest Increases potential for systematic observation
Different problems! How to control input and output? Input: ecological validity problem (‘controlling thoughts’) Output: controlling responses:
Response specification - artificiality ‘Exuberant responding’ – loss of data
Picture naming & descriptionDescribe the action in this picture
“The girl is throwing a ball to the boy”
“The girl is throwing the boy a ball”
Neurophysiological Measures Recent technological developments allow
research on neurophysiological aspects of production. ERPs, fMRI, PET, Which areas of the brain are involved? What is the time course of processing? Are different areas/processes/timecourses
associated with different aspects of production?
The case of Speech Errors
What errors tell us about correct speech: Observational and experimental approaches
Recommended reading: Um… Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What they Mean, by Michael Erard (2007)
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
..we’ll have the hags flung out
FOR ... Battle ships and cruisers
FOR ... customary to kiss the bride
FOR ... Cosy little nook
Cattle ships and bruisers
FOR ... ..we’ll have the flags hung out
kisstomary to cuss the bride.
you’ve tasted two worms” FOR ... .. you’ve wasted two terms
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
Speech errors
..in case she decide FOR ...in case she decidesto 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.
Anticipation: in anticipation of a forthcoming segment, we replace an earlier segment with the later segment
Speech errors
It's a meal mystery FOR .. It's a real mystery
..bake my bike. FOR .. take my bike.
give the goy FOR .. give the boy
Speech errors
Perseverance: an earlier segment replaces a later one (while also being articulated in its correct location)
..he pulled a pantrum. FOR ..he pulled a tantrum.
I didn’t explain it clarefully enough
Speech errors
Addition: something is added to the target utterance
FOR I didn’t explain it carefully enough.
Blends: occur when more than one word is being considered, and the two blend into a single item
Speech errors
didn’t bother me FOR didn’t bother mein the sleast. in the least/slightest.
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
Speech errors
“Jack” is the president FOR “Jack” is the subject of the sentence. of the sentence.
I’m stuttering FOR I’m studying psycholinguistics. psycholinguistics.
Look for regularities in the patterns of errors
Speech error regularities What can we learn from speech errors?
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?
If we look at the shift error
“a maniac for weekends.” FOR “a weekend for maniacs.”
Stress exchange:
What can we learn from speech errors?
Speech error regularities
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.
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.
What can we learn from speech errors?
Speech error regularities
From this we can infer that Indicates that phonetic features are psychologically
real - phonetic features must be units in speech production.
“bat a tog” FOR “pat a dog”
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
What can we learn from speech errors?
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.
Speech error regularities What can we learn from speech errors?