In light of our recent class discussions concerning verbal blunders and speech disfluencies I was compelled to find an article pertaining to these aspects of speech. The article I found discussed the incidence of speech errors in Spanish. The authors were attempting to prove that Spanish speaking people do have a lexical bias (tendency for phonological errors to form existing words), in response to an earlier study that had come to the opposite conclusion, that there is no lexical bias in Spanish. It was not the final conclusion of the paper that interested me so much as it was the results they obtain during their study.
The experimenters used pairs of words which they displayed on a computer screen to observers. The observers were to read these pairs as fast as they could, one pair right after the other. Some pairs were target pairs (those pairs in which the errors were likely to occur) and others were primer pairs (those pairs which caused the observer to activate certain phonemes right before the target pairs). The most interesting result to me was that shorter words produced more errors than longer words.
The authors suggest this pertains to phonological neighborhoods. Phonological neighbors, according to the authors, are words that are identical, except for a single phoneme. Smaller words have more phonological neighbors than longer words, so there is a greater opportunity for an error to occur. Examples given by the authors include the following: cat has many phonological neighbors, such as bat, chat, fat, and so on; whereas paleontology has no phonological neighbors. Therefore there are more opportunities for errors when using shorter words.
I found this extremely interesting. I would have thought the exact opposite, that longer words would produce more errors because they are more complex, syllabically speaking. I thought this article was very appropriate for our recent class discussions and I hope it will generate some thoughts that can be carried over into our future classes.
The title of this article is Spoonish Spanerisms: A Lexical Bias Effect in Spanish. The Authors are Robert J. Hartsuiker, Bjorn Roelstraete, Ines Anton-Mendez, and Albert Costa. The article was found in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2006, Vol. 32, No. 4, 949-953.