I was on the phone with my boyfriend who lives in Florida while he was watching a University of Florida football game. I asked him how Florida was doing, and he said that it had been a little rainy. I had been talking about Florida in terms of their basketball team, and he thought I was talking about the state of Florida. I thought this was interesting in terms of sentence prosessing, because he clearly retrieved a different meaning from the word “Florida” than I intended.
I was just listening to Bush’s State of the Union address, and I heard him say that we’d just lost a surge in Iraq. This confused me, since I thought the surge was going well and Bush was pleased with the results. Then I heard him say that the Iraqis lost a surge of their own. He went on to talk about Iraqi victory, and I realized I must have misheard.
Suddenly I realized - it was “launched”, not “lost”! He was saying that the Iraqis had launched a surge of their own. The only phonetic mismatch is that I heard “st” instead of “nched”, and I’d misheard it at least twice. Both end in alveolar stops, and all the sounds are alveolar - the nasal consonant was really the only thing that was missing. In complex consonant clusters like in “nched”, it’s not uncommon to reduce some of the consonants, so mishearing “launched” as “lost” isn’t that strange.
While shopping at the mall last weekend, a good friend and I were chatting about something that had happend the night before and I meant to say “I hate all the he said she said. . .” However, instead I extented the voiceless alveo-palatal fricative [?] to the word “said” and ended up with “I hate all the he said she shed. . .” It’s quite a tounge-twister.
So I was in my introduction to theatre design, and the teacher Kevin was discussing design meetings. Design meetings are when a show is in the process of being produced, and the director, and the designers, and all the other people who work on the theatrical production meet together to dicuss the show. And Kevin said that an important thing that must happen for a succesful design meeting is “Eagles go out the window.” And I was suddenly confused. Why are there eagles in a design meeting? We were discussing the play Antigone; Were there eagles in Antigone? Our school mascot is the eagle! Did Kevin mean that we shouldn’t bring school pride into a theatre production? It wasn’t until a few sentences later that Kevin said: “Like I said before, EGOS go out the window.” Egos would be much more relevant in theatre collaborations. I think it’s safe to say that I made an outside influence perception error. Perhaps somebody was wearing a shirt that said “eagles” on it, or for some other reason I was thinking about a giant bird instead of the opinions of a costume designer.
When I was doing my reading for British Victorian literature I came across this sentence: “If they want money, work and wages are waiting for them.” When I began reading the sentence, I grouped “money, work and wages” into a list of what “they” wanted. Once I reached “are,” though, I had to reanalyze the sentence and find the subject for that verb. “Work and wages” became the subject. This was a local parsing error.
The other day when I got home from classes, my dad ended up getting home at the same time. He came out of his car with groceries, and I had seen him come home with groceries twice already that day. I said, “Isn’t that the third time you’ve gotten to get food?” I did a sentence-level blend of “gotten food” and “gone to get food,” which was probably worsened by the fact that both gotten and gone have the [g] and the [n] phonemes.
From Professor Tweedy -
Blend of “Barak” and “Obama”, probably occurred very late at the articulatory level. An instance of two items in the articulatory stream being articulated together.
Watching an episode of “The Tyra Banks Show”, my roommate and I were making scathing commentary about the show’s quality. At some point we ran out of intelligent comments and began to note Tyra’s weight gain (pathetic, I know). She had some terribly unflattering pants on, and my roommate said, “Oh my god, look at Thyra’s… I mean Tyra’s thighs!!” And we couldn’t help but burst into uncontrollable laughter for a very long time about how appropriate that slip was. Now we call her Thighra. It’s really mean, and I hope you don’t think we are terrible people, but if you can’t laugh at celebritites, who can you laugh at? Anyway, she clearly anticipated the coming interdental voiceless prevocalic fricative [th] in what should have been an alveolar voiceless prevocalic stop [t]. In addition, the vowel in both was the same phoneme [ay]. I feel like it would be hard NOT to make that mistake in the same situation.
The other day, I was talking to my friend about our up-coming trip out of the country for Spring Break. We were discussing our mode of transportation, and she said, “But getting a caxi will be expensive!” She meant, “taxi,” but I think her tongue got stuck in a velar position.
Trying to express my disgust with something (whose context I don’t recall), I used the word “revolsing.” This was likely an error caused by accessing the synonomous words “revolting” and “repulsive” in my mental lexicon simultaneously and being unable to make a decision about which word to use in time before having to produce it. I was holding both words in my concious mind and ended up pronouncing (in part) both as well.
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