Psycholinguistics Introduction
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P2
2025-10-28
41
Psycholinguistics Introduction
Although there is little agreement on how many words an adult native speaker of English might know, let us take a conservative estimate of 20,000 based on Nation, 2006, but see Section 8.2, and let us also assume that s l le is not one of them. Imagine such a native speaker searching through their 20,000-word mental lexicon as we call the dictionary in our heads. Let’s assume that they do so at a seemingly impressive rate of 100 words per second which incidentally is 20 times faster than a good reading pace of 300 words per minute. At this rate, if they searched exhaustively through their mental lexicon, it would still take over 3 minutes to confirm that s l le is not there. et if you ask someone if they know the word s l le, they will be able to tell you more or less instantly that they do not. Clearly something is wrong with the assumptions we have just made about how rapidly we can look up words in our mental lexicon, or about the way in which we search through it, or both.
Ask someone to tell you what they had for breakfast, and then ask them to explain the workings of their coffee machine, and you are likely to find that their speech is much more hesitant in the second task than in the first, with more errors and restarts as well as pauses and uhms and ahs. The differences here reveal something about the nature of planning involved in different speaking tasks. The locations of the hesitations might also tell you which kinds of words and/or sentence structures the speaker finds more difficult to find or to put together.
Have a conversation with someone while they are carrying out a difficult task like driving a car, and you will find that both their language production and their language comprehension is less fluent than at other times Becic e al., 2010.
If you listen out for speech errors, or slips of the tongue, you are much more likely to hear an error where the beginning sounds of two words have been swapped over, as in tip of the slongue’, than one where the beginning of one word and the end of another have been exchanged, as in slit of the pongue’.
When you see a sign like that in Figure 1.1, or one that says Please go slowly round the bend’, you might well chuckle, but your experience of misreading the sign shows that there are certain preferred patterns of analysing the structure and meaning of sentences in English.
Consider what is wrong with the following interaction between speakers A and B, in which SILENCE indicates noticeably long periods of silence, and CAPITALS indicates the part of the word that receives word stress:
There are of course a number of odd features here – there is meaningless and irrelevant content, there are long silences with odd patterns of pausing, there are infelicities of vocabulary and structure A single ticket licences a one-way journey’, Palmerston North trains from platform 3 leave’, there is strange stress placement PalMERston’ and another odd pronunciation sleeeeep’. Looking at odd’ speech like this the example is fabricated but the principle remains valid sheds some light on what we need to do in order to speak. That is, speakers usually aim to produce utterances that have appropriate meaningful content, that use appropriate lexical items and grammatical structures, and that have appropriate pronunciation, intonation and phrasing. Speakers aim to do this fluently and in real time, and rarely have opportunity to rehearse. They also have to relate what they say to the context, including to previous speech in a conversation.
Speakers are generally very good at doing this. For example, one experiment was explicitly designed to elicit subject-verb agreement errors like 1.1, where the subject is plural e o s but is followed by a singular verb. The reason for the error is that the most recent noun before the verb is singular language. In the experiment, fewer than 5 of the stimuli designed to produce agreement errors like this actually did so Bock Miller, 1991.
In spontaneous speech, it has been found that sound errors e.g. saying par cark’ for car park’ occur only about 1.5 times per 10,000 words, and word errors where the wrong word is chosen or words change positions in a sentence occur only about 2.5 times per 10,000 words (Deese, 1984). Clearly, we are generally pretty good at what we do when we produce and understand language.
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