Exploratory task 1.4

The task is done by the team of three. One student is asked to reason on “Three requisites for being happy”. The other two students try to write a transcript of the monologue and indicate the long pauses in it (these two variants are to be compared and put together). After that the group interprets the process of planning and executing the utterance. Where have the pauses been made and why?

Transcript with pauses	Interpretation of planning process

Accessing one’s lexicon in mind can be difficult. Speakers sometimes experience the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon studied by Brown and McNeill (Brown, R. 1970. Psycholinguistics. Selected Papers. N.Y.). Another problem is that in accessing mental lexicon we can say "yesterday" instead of "tomorrow" and "shirt" instead of "shorts". This happens because too many words are activated in mind at every single moment of speech production. This phenomenon is called “spread activation” of the brain cells (Aitchison, J.1999. The Articulate Mammal. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. L. N.Y. P. 251-253).

Exploratory task 1.5 Give a word for the definitions. Record all the guesses made unwittingly by the participants. Give the final decision.

Definition	Guesses	The word
A portion of space
An adult male
A building used as a dwelling
Genuine
Mailed message
Exchangeable equivalent of all
To reserve

The process of oral speech production is not error free. Language inaccuracies in oral utterances are generally referred to as "slips of the tongue" though a more correct term could be "slips of the brain" as it is not the tongue but the brain that is responsible for the error. Inaccuracies in speech can be of the two types: word selection errors and sentence assemblage errors. Word selection errors are grouped as "semantic errors", "similar sound errors" and "blends". Semantic errors are also called similar meaning errors when the speaker goes to the correct semantic field but chooses the wrong word. E.g. a speaker can say "left" having in mind "right" or can say "yesterday" meaning "today". Sound resemblance errors consist in mistakenly using a word, which resembles the target word phonetically, e.g. "chicken" instead of "kitchen". Blends occur when the two words are blended together as in "a cup of copper" instead of "a cup of coffee" or “not in the sleast” instead of “not in the slightest” and “not in the least” blending together in the speaker’s mind.

Exploratory task 1.6 Match the following “slips of the tongue” with their types. Comment on the mechanism of slips in each case

Slips of the tongue	Types of slips
You’ve tasted the worm, I mean you have wasted the term I adore winter … er … summer Put it back in space … oh… in place Where’s the mummy … ha … money coming from? Where’s the fork … oh … spoon of course?	Semantic errors Sound resemblance errors Blends

Oral speech is addressed to the audience. It is time-bound, spontaneous, interactive, exists in real time, is accompanied by non-verbal features, gives an opportunity to rethink and repair, employs phonetic means such as timbre (Aitchison, J.1999. The Articulate Mammal. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. L. N.Y. P. 240-251).

Exploratory task 1.7