Getting the order wrong
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P48
2025-11-01
46
Getting the order wrong
A further group of errors illustrated in Table 3.1 involve mis-ordering. These are errors where the correct words have been selected for production but placed in the wrong position in the utterance. Mis-ordering errors tend not to involve words with strong meaning relationships except insofar as words that are used in the same utterance might very well be associatively related. Errors involving mis-ordering include anticipations e.g. 3.9 in Table 3.1, along with 3.21 and 3.22 below, perseverations e.g. 3.10, 3.23 and 3.24 and exchanges e.g. 3.11, 3.25–3.27.
A common interpretation given for errors of this type is that as a speaker develops an utterance, they access the required lexical items from their mental dictionary, but something goes wrong in assigning an item to the correct position. Often, as in some of the examples cited here, the error is noticed by the speaker and subsequently corrected, which actually makes it easier for the researcher to determine what the intended utterance was. In anticipations, a word is inserted too early into the sentence frame that has been developed. This might be because the word is a particularly frequent one or has somehow become highly activated by the context, and consequently has a higher level of activation than the intended word. In perseverations, a word that has already been used remains active’ and available for re-insertion. The persistent activation of this word may result from a failure to cross it off the list of words cued for use, again perhaps because it is a frequent word with a high level of activation.
What is interesting about these errors is that they largely involve words from the same grammatical category. For example, in the anticipation errors in 3.21 and 3.22 the noun slots after o and e respectively are filled by nouns, and in the perseveration error in 3.24 a verb slot after the form of the pronoun is filled with a verb used earlier in the utterance.
The exchanges in 3.25–3.27 all involve two nouns. It is not always the case that the two words or word-slots involved in an error are of the same category – see for instance example 3.11, where a noun and a verb are exchanged. Nevertheless, in one analysis a clear majority 85 of a set of 200-word exchanges involved two words from the same grammatical category Stemberger, 1985. As was pointed out in Chapter 2, the strong likelihood of two words involved in an ordering error being from the same grammatical category indicates that when words are selected for production, their grammatical category information is available, and words of the appropriate category are inserted into the available slots in the sentence frame.
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