International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Message editing is the process whereby speakers review and sometimes revise a message plan prior to speaking. At lower levels of linguistic output, a not-yet-spoken clause might be checked for consistency with phonemic, syntactic, and/or lexical rules. At more abstract planning levels, the acceptability of a message plan could be assessed by comparing it against a set of editing criteria, and/or by anticipating outcomes of the message (→  Goals, Social Aspects of ; Message Production ). In order to investigate message editing at the phonemic and lexical levels, Motley and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments using laboratory-induced speech errors ( Motley et al. 1983 ; →  Experiment, Laboratory ). In studies designed to elicit spoonerisms, for example, participants read aloud target word pairs, such as shoe store . When a target pair was preceded by a word pair containing a reversal of the initial phonemes in the target pair ( stoop short ), participants often produced a spoonerized version of the target pair ( stew shore ) ( Motley 1985 ). Spoonerized versions more often contained lexically legitimate words than lexically anomalous words (“lexical bias effect”). To explain these findings, as well as other contextual influences on lexical selection, Motley et al. (1983) proposed a model of pre-articulatory editing . The model holds that the everyday production of ... log in or subscribe to read full text