Language and Cognition
Colombo, June 2011
Day 4
Psycholinguistics
Experimental approaches to
understanding language
Studying speech errors
• The systems involved in speech and
language production usually work
seamlessly
• But when the system breaks down, that
can tell us something about how it was
working in the first place
– Speech can go wrong in many ways
– Different components of speech can “slip”
– The errors are not random
• Look for regularities in the patterns of 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 ...
Cattle ships and bruisers
Cosy little nook
FOR ... Battle ships and cruisers
..we’ll have the hags flung out FOR ... ..we’ll have the flags hung out
you’ve tasted two worms”
kisstomary to cuss the bride.
FOR ... .. you’ve wasted two terms
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
to hits it.
“a maniac for weekends.”
FOR
FOR
...in case she decides
to hit it
“a weekend for
maniacs.”
Speech errors: exchange
• Like a “double shift” – two linguistic units
change places
– You have hissed all my mystery lectures (target:
You have missed all my history lectures)
– You had your model renosed (target: you had your
nose remodelled)
What can we learn from shift
errors?
“a maniac for weekends.”
FOR
“a weekend for
maniacs.”
• Notice that /s/ is pronounced /z/ in the context
+voice___
• So from this error 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
Phonemic speech errors
• Anticipation: replacing an earlier segment
with a later segment
– It’s a meal mystery (target: it’s a real mystery)
– Bake my bike (target: take my bike)
• Perseverance: an earlier segment replaces a
later one (while also being articulated in its
correct location)
– Give the goy (target: give the boy)
– He pulled a pantrum (target: he pulled a tantrum)
What can we learn from phonemic
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 (or unintended real 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 nonwords
• Grammaticality effect: when words are substituted or
exchanged they typically substitute for a word of the same
grammatical class
Sub-phonemic speech errors
• bat a tog (target: 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
– phonetic features are psychologically real - must be units in
speech production
Word-level speech errors: Blends
• occur when more than one word is being
considered, and the two blend into a single
item
• Didn’t bother me in the sleast (least +
slightest?)
• I didn’t explain it clarefully enough
(clearly + carefully?)
Word level speech errors:
malapropisms
• when one segment is replaced by an intruder
• differs from the other types of errors since the
intruder may not occur at all in the intended
sentence
– “Jack” is the president of the sentence (target:
“Jack” is the subject of the sentence)
– I am stuttering psycholinguistics (target: I am
studying psycholinguistics)
What can we infer from word-level
speech errors?
• That speech is planned in advance – blends indicate
speaker has activated representations of more than
one word per concept
• 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
• Implications for theories of language production
Problems with speech errors
• Not an on-line technique – depends on observation,
reporting, anecdote
• 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. “wri..wrong one”
• Can’t be replicated
• 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.
• Evidence that we are not very good at perceiving speech
errors (Ferber, 1991 – TV announcer errors)
Experimental methods in
psycholinguistics
– The SLIP technique - speech error elicitation (Motley
and Baars 1976)
Task:
Say the words silently as quickly as you can
Say them aloud if you hear a ring
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 speech errors.
• Lexical Bias effect: error frequency affected
by whether the error results in real words or
non-words
More likely
“wrong loot” FOR “long root”
“rawn loof” FOR “lawn roof “
Syntactic priming
•
Bock (1986): syntactic persistance
tested by picture naming
TASK:
Hear and repeat a sentence
Describe the picture
Syntactic priming
a: The ghost sold the werewolf a flower
b: The ghost sold a flower to the werewolf

a: The girl gave the teacher the flowers
b: The girl gave the flowers to the teacher

Syntactic priming
• In real life, syntactic priming seems to
occur as well
– Branigan, Pickering, & Cleland (2000):
• Speakers tend to reuse syntactic constructions of
other speakers
– Potter & Lombardi (1998):
• Speakers tend to reuse syntactic constructions of
just read materials
From thought to speech
Message level
Syntactic level
Morphemic level
Phonemic level
Articulation
• Propositions to be communicated

Selection and organization of lexical items

Morphologically complex words are
constructed

Sound structure of each word is built
From thought to speech
Message level
• Propositions to be communicated


Syntactic level
Morphemic level
Phonemic level
Articulation
Not a lot known about this step
Typically thought to be shared with
comprehension processes, semantic networks,
situational models, etc.
From thought to speech
Message level
• Grammatical class constraint
Syntactic level
• Slots and frames
– Most substitutions, exchanges, and blends
involve words of the same grammatical class
– A syntactic framework is constructed, and
then lexical items are inserted into the slots
Morphemic level
Phonemic level
Articulation
From thought to speech
Message level

Stranding errors
I liked he would hope you
I hoped he would like you
Syntactic level
Morphemic level
Phonemic level
Articulation
– The inflection stayed in the same
location, the stems moved
– Inflections tend to stay in their proper
place
– Do not typically see errors like
The beeing are buzzes
The bees are buzzing
From thought to speech
Message level

Stranding errors
• Closed class items very rare in
exchanges or substitutions
Syntactic level
Morphemic level
Phonemic level
Articulation
– Two possibilities
• Part of syntactic frame
• High frequency, so lots of practice,
easily selected, etc.
From thought to speech
Message level
Syntactic level
Morphemic level
Phonemic level
Articulation
• Consonant vowel regularity
– Consonants slip with other
consonants, vowels with vowels, but
rarely do consonants slip with vowels
– The implication is that vowels and
consonants represent different kinds of
units in phonological planning
From thought to speech
Message level
Syntactic level
Morphemic level
Phonemic level
Articulation
• Consonant vowel regularity
• Evidence for the separation of meaning
and sound
 Tip of the tongue
Tip-of-the-tongue
Uhh…
It is a.. You know.. A.. Arggg.
I can almost see it, it has two
Syllables, I think it starts with
A …..
• TOT
– Meaning access
– No (little) phonological
access
– What about syntax?
Tip-of-the-tongue
• “The rhythm of the lost word may be there
without the sound to clothe it; or the
evanescent sense of something which is the
initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully,
without growing more distinct.” (James, 1890,
p. 251)
Conclusions
• Speech errors have provided data about the
units of speech production.



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.
– 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:
1 Conceptualising: we conceptualise what we wish to communicate
(“mentalese”).
2 Formulating: we formulate what we want to say into a linguistic plan.
– Lexicalisation
– Lemma Selection
– Lexeme (or Phonological Form) Selection
– Syntactic Planning
3 Articulating: we execute the plan through muscles in the vocal tract
4 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 language production
Models of other aspects of
language processing
• Word production
• In response to different kinds of stimuli
• Written word reading, naming seen objects,
repeating heard words, writing heard words,
reading silently, reading aloud, writing to
dictation….
• All involve different steps but access similar
representations