Parents Accidentally Substitute Similar Sounding Sibling Names More Often then Dissimilar Names

Zenzi M. Griffin, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States of AmericaZenzi M. Griffin, Thomas Wangerman, School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of AmericaWhen parents select similar sounding names for their children, do they set themselves up for more speech errors in the future? Questionnaire data from 334 respondents suggest that they do. Respondents whose names shared initial or final sounds with a sibling’s reported that their parents accidentally called them by the sibling’s name more often than those without such name overlap. Having a sibling of the same gender, similar appearance, or similar age was also associated with more frequent name substitutions. Almost all other name substitutions by parents involved other family members and over 5% of respondents reported a parent substituting the name of a pet, which suggests a strong role for social and situational cues in retrieving personal names for direct address. To the extent that retrieval cues are shared with other people or animals, other names become available and may substitute for the intended name, particularly when names sound similar.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0318456. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.PsychologyEmail: [email protected]

Phonological influences on lexical (mis)selection

Abstract—Speakers produce words to convey meaning, but does meaning alone determine which words they say? We report three experiments that show independent semantic and phonological influences converging to determine word selection. Speakers named pictures (e.g., of a priest) following visually presented cloze sentences that primed either semantic competitors of the target object name (“The woman went to the convent to become a...”), homophones of the competitors (“I thought that there would still be some cookies left, but there were...”), or matched unrelated control object names. Primed semantic competitors (nun) were produced instead of picture names more often than primed unrelated control object names, showing the well-documented influence of semantic similarity on lexical selection. Surprisingly, primed homophone competitors (none) also substituted for picture names more often than control object names even though they only sounded like competitors. Thus, independent semantic and phonological influences can converge to affect word selection. People are remarkably successful at selecting words that express what they intend to say. Yet much evidence about how this process of lexical selection works comes from errors in which speakers produce unintended words instead of intended ones. At least two kinds of such word substitutions 1 have been observed. In semantic substitutions, the intended and intruding words are similar in meaning (e.g., “he got hot under the belt”; Fromkin, 1973); in phonological substitutions or malapropisms, the words are similar in sound (e.g., “White Anglo-Saxon prostitute”; Fromkin, 1973). These two kinds of word substitutions have been taken to reflect two distinct lexical processes (e.g., Dell, 1986; Levelt, Roelofs, &amp

The effect of additional characters on choice of referring expression: Everyone counts☆

Two story-telling experiments examine the process of choosing between pronouns and proper names in speaking. Such choices are traditionally attributed to speakers striving to make referring expressions maximally interpretable to addressees. The experiments revealed a novel effect: even when a pronoun would not be ambiguous, the presence of another character in the discourse decreased pronoun use and increased latencies to refer to the most prominent character in the discourse. In other words, speakers were more likely to call Minnie Minnie than shewhen Donald was also present. Even when the referent character appeared alone in the stimulus picture, the presence of another character in the preceding discourse reduced pronouns. Furthermore, pronoun use varied with features associated with the speaker’s degree of focus on the preceding discourse (e.g., narrative style and disfluency). We attribute this effect to competition for attentional resources in the speaker’s representation of the discourse

The time course for structuring spoken utterances

Issued as final reportNational Science Foundation (U.S.