Web Activity 10.1 Collecting speech errors

Keep a speech error journal over the coming week:

1. Jot down every speech error you notice, whether spoken by you or someone else. These might include:
• Using the wrong word, by replacing one word with another
• Using a garbled syntactic structure
• Switching two words or parts of words in the sentence with each other
• Mispronouncing a word by omitting, adding, or switching around sounds
2. Note whether there were any contextual circumstances that seem relevant, and whether the speaker caught the error or it went unnoticed.
3. Propose an explanation for why the speech error occurred in the specific form that it did. Identify whether you think the errors is due to an error in:
• deciding what to express—that is, settling on the wrong idea or concept to express,
• choosing the wrong word to express a specific concept,
• choosing the right syntactic structure to express an idea,
• choosing the wrong sounds to articulate a specific word.

Be sure to draw on what you already know about how language is learned and represented. For example, you might consider:

• how words are stored in memory, as suggested by the research on word recognition you saw in Chapter 8;
• the similarity relationships between certain speech sounds, as seen in Chapter 4 and 8;
• the importance of frequency of words or structures;
• limitations of working memory (from Chapter 9);
• competition from alternative words or forms (from Chapters 8 and 9).