SLIPS OF THE TONGUE (SOTs)
Language is all around us and constitutes a major part of our waking lives. This assignment serves to ground your study of psycholinguistics in concrete events involving language, specifically as you go about speaking or signing. By starting to become aware of your own speech production and the errors you may make while speaking or signing, you will then report three speech/sign errors, commonly known as slips-of-the-tongue (SOTs).
What should I be looking for?
While speaking (or signing) seems like an effortless task, it is however not immune to some "accidents". As a native speaker or signer, you are bound to make some mistakes in the course of your language production. While you may not just report on any random speech or sign error, we need you to be specific and accurate in how your slips-of-the-tongue (SOTs) tie to concepts covered in 491. In order to help you have a sense of what we're looking for in this assignment, three sample SOTs have been provided.
One great source of speech errors actually comes from your instructors as they lecture in class. Be attentive to their speech (and the content of their speech!) and you'll find out that we slip up quite frequently!
How should I write up my SOTs?
Once you've experienced or heard an SOT and identified how it can be tied to course concepts, you will need to record each one of them using the template on page 4. You need to be as precise as you can in your reporting, and you may therefore use more than one page for this assignment. You will then need to upload your assignment as a PDF to the corresponding Blackboard dropbox.
How will my assignment be graded?
Reporter (you):
Relation to speaker (brother, sister, friend, spouse, etc.)
Date and approximate time:
Speaker:
General characteristics (sex? approximate age?)
Special characteristics (native speaker? bilingual?)
Can you identify a regional accent?
Was the speaker ill or very tired, angry or excited, sober or drunk?
Context:
Casual conversation, heated argument, public lecture, radio, TV, etc.
Error:
Include as much as you can accurately recall of the immediately preceding and following wording, including any self-corrections.
Intended or Target:
If not obvious from the error, write your inference regarding what the speaker meant to say; if you're the speaker, include what you remember your message was.
Comments:
This part of the assignment should be analytical. As you'll see in the following examples, each report includes an analysis of the error. Your comments should also include any details that you think affected your interpretation and analysis of the error data. So, for
example:
- Did the speaker appear to notice the error?
- Were you able to question the speaker about the error? If so, when did your questioning occur? Immediately after the error or after some delay and intervening conversation?
- Were other observers present? Did they notice the error? If you had the chance to ask them, did they agree on what the error was?
- Was the error uttered fluently, or was it hesitant? Were there pauses or fillers like um?
- Was the prosody of the whole utterance normal? If there was some departure from normal prosody, try to describe it.
- If the error was a word or phrase intrusion, did the intruding material (or any topically related material) occur earlier in the speaker's environment (e.g., conversation, billboard seen while driving)?
- How confident are you that you heard the error correctly? That is, did you notice it while listening or pick it up in a ‘mental replay' after noting ‘something funny' about what you just heard?
Note that sound-based errors require the use of the IPA.
Note that style of writing will be taken into account in the evaluation of your assignment.
Attachment:- assighn.rar