When Language Users Grow Up: Producing the Spoken Language
(17-Nov-2003)
Aspects of spoken language that may be investigated include speech
production and comprehension. As well as constructing experiments,
spoken language ability is typically observed in a naturalistic
setting, from which "naturally displayed evidence" may provide clues as to the
underlying mechanisms involved. This is sometimes broken down:
- Non-verbal evidence, sometimes referred to as "hesitation
phenomena" include
- those without phonation: i.e. periods of silence, which may be
pauses for breath (i.e. speaker oriented), or for example to allow time for
the meaning of a phrase to "sink in" (i.e. listener oriented)
- those with phonation: things like "err", "mmm", "well", "like" -
i.e. words and non-words which may show that the speaker is collecting his
thoughts
- verbal evidence (i.e. associated with words in some way) may be
marked by some kind of anomaly (as compared to "non-marked" speech
which displays no obvious peculiarities):
- advertant errors are those which are consciously included by
the speaker, and may be either:
- deliberate - such as jokes ("the play what I wrote"), puns,
imitations
- non-deliberate - such as malapropisms and mispronunciations
- inadvertant errors are ones which typically lead the speaker
to ask "did I really say that?", for example spoonerisms. These are
often the most revealing in terms of clues as to the underlying processes
involved from forming a thought to articulating it.
Inadvertant errors can be classified (see Crystal p.265 for a list)
according to the unit of speech affected, and what kind of error occurred:
- Errors affecting single sounds
- anticipation, e.g. "the golly green giant"
- exchange, (spoonerism) e.g. "don't forget the coastal pode"
- Errors affecting sound clusters
- exchange, e.g. "trying floops"
- Errors affecting single words
- perseveration, e.g. "I really didn't like it really"
- exchange, e.g. "as you reap, so shall you sow"
- shift, e.g. "I don't know what you could else do"
- stranded exchange, e.g. "You'll have to square it facely" (note
suffix of final word is preserved)
- blend, e.g. "Would you prefer meef" (beef/meat mixed up)
- complex (aka "other")
- Errors affecting groups of words
- blend, e.g. "A lot as possible" (beef/meat mixed up)
The "Tip of the tongue" phenomenon is another which seems to be able to
tell us about what's happening when we translate ideas into speech.
In all these cases, the errors are not random: they reflect documentable
patterns and can be used to diagnose the levels and processes involved in
speech production.
Book readings:
- Crystal, ch. 45
- Fromkin: "An Introduction to Language" ch. 9
- Trask: "Language, the Basics", ch. 7
Language in the Individual and in
Society notes index