16.3588, Review: Language Acquisition: Jaeger (2005)

Sun Dec 18 11:39:23 UTC 2005

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3588. Sun Dec 18 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3588, Review: Language Acquisition: Jaeger (2005)

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1)
Date: 15-Dec-2005
From: Annette Hohenberger < hohenberger at cbs.mpg.de >
Subject: Kids' Slips 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:08:56
From: Annette Hohenberger < hohenberger at cbs.mpg.de >
Subject: Kids' Slips 

AUTHOR: Jaeger, Jeri J.
TITLE: Kids' Slips
SUBTITLE: What young children's slips of the tongue reveal about 
language development
PUBLISHER: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1196.html 

Annette Hohenberger,  Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and 
Brain Sciences, Munich, Germany 

SYNOPSIS

''Kids' slips'', by Jeri J. Jaeger (henceforth, JJJ), is the first monograph 
about young children's slips of the tongue (henceforth, SOTs), based 
on the biggest collection sampled to date of child slips from 
monolingual English-speaking children from 1;7 -- 5;11 years of age, 
mostly stemming from her own three children, Anna (AN), Alice (AL), 
and Bob(by) (B).

The book is organized into six chapters. In the first chapter, the SOT 
approach to studying child language is introduced. In the second 
chapter, children's and adults' slips are compared. The remaining four 
chapters are devoted to phonetics/phonology, the lexicon, semantics, 
and morphology/syntax. Each of these four chapters is self-contained 
and may be read independently, although, of course, they build upon 
each other and there is ample cross referencing. The body of the 
book is followed by the complete and annotated corpus of the 
children's slips (n = 1383).

The purpose of her book, according to the author herself, is (i) to use 
children's slips as evidence for the development of linguistic 
representations and language production planning in phonology, 
morphology, syntax, and the lexicon and (ii) to lay out a common 
methodology as to guide future researchers in their (cross-linguistic) 
study of children's slips.

METHODOLOGY: How can we know if a child has made a slip? This 
crucial methodological problem is only manageable if (i) the 
researcher knows the current grammatical system of the child on the 
background of which a systematic deviation due to lack of competence 
can be ruled out and/or if (ii) the child possibly indicates a SOT herself 
by means of a self-repair or otherwise shows signs of having erred 
(such as looking confused). Given that the author has this intimate 
knowledge of the three main subjects of the study -- her own children -
- and given that external error sources (unavoidable in a pencil-and-
paper collection) such as perceptional and collectors' biases have 
been shown to not systematically distort off-line slip collections (for a 
survey, see Poulisse, 1999), the methodological problem of child SOT 
research can be considered as settled, in this study.

CLASSIFICATION: The SOTs have been arranged in a coherent 
classification system which JJJ mainly takes over from adult SOT 
research. The errors are classified according to:
(i) the LINGUISTIC COMPONENT, resp. the PROCESSING STAGE. Is 
this a phonological, lexical, syntactic, or propositional error?
(ii) the DIRECTIONALITY of the error, if it is a contextual/syntagmatic 
error. Is this an anticipation, perseveration, or exchange?
(iii) the FORM of the error. Is this a substitution, addition, omission, 
exchange, blend, telescoping, or multiple error?

MODEL: JJJ puts forward a REPRESENTATIONS AND PROCESSING 
COMPONENTS MODEL (RPC, pp 6-11) which is based on Levelt's 
(Levelt, 1989, Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer, 1999) serial-modular model 
of language production but which extends it in specific ways. The RPC 
model distinguishes representations in the long term memory such as 
concepts, lemmas in the content lexicon, and forms in the form lexicon 
on the one hand from planning processes in short term memory such 
as lexical selection of words, determination of functional structures 
and selection of syntactic structures on the other hand. All SOTs can 
be allocated to respective levels of processing involving specific 
linguistic representations. In any two-stage model of production, 
access to a word's syntactic features and meaning (its lemma) and 
morpho-phonological form happens on two different levels of planning. 
Misselection due to semantic similarity may arise in the first stage 
during lexical assignment to functional structure resulting in a 
semantic substitution such as ''I wanna watch ... I wanna 
listen to Baby Beluga'' (B-71, 2;6.2). Misordering of 
phonological segments, however, happens in the second stage when 
the word's form is accessed and its phonological units are filled into 
the respective positional slots, resulting in e.g. an anticipation such 
as ''A stecond story ... a second story'' (AL-235, 4;9.18) where the 
phoneme [t] of ''story'' is anticipated and added to the planned 
word ''second''.

CHILDREN'S vs. ADULTS' SLIPS: In order to compare children's to 
adults' slips, JJJ had collected a reference corpus of n=716 adult 
slips, which can be accessed at 
http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/jaeger/adultSOT.html. One 
crucial precondition in this respect is that both children's and adults' 
slips must be similar enough to fit into the same classification system 
and model. In a global survey, JJJ establishes such a comparability in 
terms of error types and error proportions. She concludes that 
children's slips are very similar to adults' slips, overall. Differences in 
the processing span of contextual errors, directionality, formal 
structure, units, and self-corrections can be attributed to the 
development of linguistic representation, working memory, and the 
monitor. Given these overall similarities and specific differences, the 
value of children's slips can be fully appreciated since ''they allow us 
to tap into the time-course of the development of specific aspects of 
language, by seeing how the substance of the errors changes over 
time'' (p 90).

PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY: Phonological SOTs are the most 
common slips in adults as well as in children. Their onset indicates 
that children no longer treat words as unanalyzed wholes but as units 
with a structural frame and segmental content. The onset coincides 
with the vocabulary spurt at around 18-21 months when children have 
acquired a critical mass of about 50 words suggesting a major 
reanalysis of words in the mental lexicon in terms of phonological 
representation. From that time on ''... the segment has primary status 
in the phonological aspects of young children's production planning'' 
(p 109). For both adults and children, it is feature similarity which 
accounts strongest for the likelihood of a phonological SOT. 
Consonantal phonological SOTs in which error and target segment 
differ in only one of the five relevant distinctive features, namely place 
of articulation (POA), +/-continuous, +/-fricative, +/-voice, and +/-
nasal, are most frequent. Vowels are less frequently affected by slips 
than consonants, in both children and adults. In vowel errors, besides 
feature distance, stress figures prominently: it is two stressed vowels 
which are most likely involved in a vowel slip.

An excellent example of how children's slips can pinpoint the onset of 
crucial developments in phonological representation and processing is 
provided by allophonic variation. In adult slips, if a novel phonological 
sequence is generated by the slip, the correct allophonic variant is 
automatically produced, as in the (additive) anticipation ''singks inches'' 
<-- six inches (OC-88, 4;1), where the alveolar nasal [n] becomes a 
velar nasal [ng]. Children, however, have to learn which allophones 
there are and the rules producing the correct variants. Low-level 
assimilations such as nasalization of the vowel before a nasal C or 
POA assimilation of C's within a syllable (see above) are present from 
the very outset whereas POA assimilation across syllables or (de-)
voicing of sonorants in C-cluster occurs only after 2 years of age, 
when the relevant contexts have been acquired. Specific phonological 
processes in English such as velarization of [l], +/-aspiration of 
plosives, or tapping are learned even later.

The syllable as a supra-segmental domain constrains phonological 
SOTs in adults in important ways. In languages with hierarchical 
syllable structure such as English, the 'syllable position constraint' 
allows only segments in identical syllable positions to interact, i.e., 
onset with onset, nucleus with nucleus, coda with coda. Until the 
second year of life, however, infants entertain a more holistic 
representation of the whole word which is successively refined into a 
linear and hierarchical structure with highly specific phonological 
content. Only after 2;2 years of age is the syllable position constraint 
obeyed suggesting that the syllable has superseded the whole word 
as basic structural unit of phonological processing (p 215). Moreover, 
the prevalence of consonantal onset errors from 2;6 years on 
suggests the mastery of the onset-rhyme analysis of English.

LEXICAL ERRORS: Lexical errors come in two kinds: paradigmatic 
errors (substitution, blend) and syntagmatic errors (anticipation, 
perseveration, exchange, telescoping). The former are due to 
selection errors; the latter are due to linearization errors. Substitutions 
also come in two kinds: semantic substitutions and formal 
substitutions, so-called 'malapropisms'. While in both adults and 
children, (besides same lexical category) semantic similarity is the 
most influential factor accounting for a substitution (children 69%; 
adults 70%), phonological similarity is less influential in children than it 
is in adults (40% vs. 55%, p 282). This result suggests that of the two 
big dimensions by which the mental lexicon is organized -- meaning 
and form -- semantics is present earlier and remains more influential 
than phonology which develops only later and plays a secondary role. 
Besides categorical, semantic, and phonological similarity, other 
factors, too, contribute to lexical errors, among them tonic stress, 
previous utterance, rhythmic weight and environmental influences. 
Usually, 3-5 such factors are involved in a single lexical slip. 

Above all, identity of lexical category figures prominently in speech 
error research as a severe constraint on the possible interaction of 
words, often referred to as the 'grammatical category constraint' (for a 
survey, see Poulisse, 1999). According to this constraint, nouns may 
only interact with nouns, verbs with verbs, etc. On a more general 
level, it also pertains to the two broad classes of lexical vs. functional 
categories which also rarely interact. Identifying the onset of the 
lexical category constraint is relevant to the question if young children 
organize words in terms of lexical category from the very beginning or 
not, and if not, in terms of which other system they may conceive of 
them. At first glance, children seem to respect this constraint as much 
as adults do (88% vs. 86,5%, p 291), from the outset. However, by 
looking at the earliest lexical slips in the 1- and 2-word stage, JJJ finds 
that they are strongly motivated by other than strictly lexical 
categorical factors, mainly by conceptual but also phonetic similarity, 
environmental and contextual influences. Given this strong 
determination by non-linguistic factors, JJJ proposes to link the onset 
of the lexical category constraint with the onset of syntax which both 
start at around 2;6 years of age. This linking is also corroborated by 
the finding that at around 3 years there is a (modest) peak of 
syntagmatic as well as function word errors creating two coupled U-
shaped curves of development.

SEMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS IN LEXICAL ERRORS: Having 
established that semantics has the strongest influence on lexical 
errors from early on, JJJ asks further which the semantic relationships 
are that figure importantly in this respect. For this purpose, she 
develops a classification scheme (pp 320ff) comprising (i) taxonomic 
sets ('fruit -- apple, pear'), (ii) non-taxonomic sets ('pillow -- blanket') 
or co-members of a set ('Mommy -- Daddy'), (iii) partonomic sets 
('hand -- finger'), (iv) contrastive relations ('slow -- fast'), (v) synonymy 
('bunny -- rabbit'), (vi) associative relations (metonymy and 
connotation), and (vii) function words (esp. pronouns). Conceptual-
semantic categories such as pairs of concrete actors belonging 
together, often proper names such as 'Mommy -- Daddy', 'Bert -- 
Ernie', are among the first relationships and may be considered 
precursors of more elaborate lexical-semantic taxonomies involving co-
hyponyms ('apple -- pear') under a common hyperonym ('fruit'). 
Overall, the semantic relations between words are strikingly similar in 
children and adults: they mainly wallow in co-hyponymical relations, 
followed by associative errors. However, the importance of the 
relationships changes over time. In the beginning, binary coordinated 
relations dominate. In this context, the ''lemma'' is an important 
concept, mediating between conceptual and lexical semantics. 
Consider the two interactants in a semantic substitution, ''watch'' 
and ''listen''. Conceptually, these are quite different actions -- lexical-
categorically, however, they make great co-hyponyms in a common 
taxonomic hierarchy. The latter organization into lemmas amounts to 
an abstraction over a semantic domain which supersedes a more 
holistic conceptual organization of words. This reorganization takes 
place between 1;7 and 2;6 years of age and is intimately related with 
the onset of syntax.

MORPHOLOGY: Morphology is traditionally linked to syntax as well as 
to lexical word formation processes. In syntax, inflectional 
morphological affixes are attached to the syntactic frames, which 
provide slots for lexical roots. In the lexicon, morphological affixes 
attach to word frames and generate novel words. Morphological 
errors come in three kinds: morphological shifts such as ''two 
bubbles gum_'' (AL-11, 2;2), morphological substitutions such 
as ''I've been suck-ed on'' <-- suck-ing (B-456, 5;1) and 
root morpheme exchanges (so-called 'stranding' errors) such as ''my 
run is nos-ing'' (AN-57, 2;7). Overall, inflectional 
errors are more abundant than derivational errors, in children even 
more so than in adults. Children do not yet have such a rich lexicon 
with many derived words, whereas they do have already productive 
syntactic processes. Since the bonds between roots and inflectional 
affixes are weaker than the bonds between roots and derivational 
affixes, there are more inflectional errors. Only highly productive 
derivational morphemes are also stranding-prone (p 409).

Inflectional morphemes are strongly related to syntax and thus are 
more frequent in syntagmatic errors (e.g. morpheme shifts) than in 
paradigmatic errors (e.g. substitutions). Again, the onset of inflectional 
morpheme shifts such as ''two bubbles gum_'' coincides with 
the onset of syntax (p 405). It takes until 2;2 years of age for the child 
to factor out the abstract morphemes and make them available as 
affixes to syntactic frames. Since children do not know so many poly-
morphemic words, they have no reason to analyze their morphological 
structure and to represent it in lexical entries. It takes even longer, 
until the 6th year of life, until children can reliably segment stem and 
bound morphemes correctly (p 456). During this time they commit 
more morpheme shift errors than adults, in poly-morphemic words and 
multi-word phrases, since the localization of the morpheme in the 
respective word frame or syntactic template is not yet as fix as in 
adults. Children show the same prevalence as adults of inflected 
words to become involved in a stranding error as compared to derived 
words.

Like phonological similarity, morphological similarity, too, enhances the 
likelihood of a lexical substitution error. The interactants share the 
same morphological structure in children's as well as in adults' slips 
(84% vs. 76.5%), most clearly when two mono-syllabic words are 
involved. Adults, due to their bigger and more refined lexicons, 
represent more morphological information and have more poly-
morphemic words (esp. Latinate words). The strongest argument for 
the representation of morphemes in the form lexicon comes from 
malapropisms: they always show higher morphological similarity as 
opposed to semantic substitutions (86% vs. 81% for children, 81% vs. 
74.5% for adults, p 443). 

SYNTAX: Parallel to her claim of an early stage of a purely conceptual 
organization prior to a lexical organization, JJJ also claims an early 
semantic prior to a syntactic stage. The evidence against a syntactic 
account comes from SOTs in the 1- and 2-word stage in which there 
are (i) no morphological errors, there is (ii) no evidence of lexical 
categories, (iii) no influence of morpho-semantic categories (such as 
+/-transitive; mass/count noun), nor of (iv) phrasal tonic stress on 
SOTs. Only upon entering into the 3-word-stage do all these features 
appear (p 480).

The only SOT category directly related to syntax are phrasal blends 
such as ''I won't let you to'' (AL-71, 2;10), a blend of ''I won't 
let you'' and ''I don't want you to'' (p 468). Along the lines of 
the 'competing plans hypothesis' (Baars, 1992), phrase blends occur 
when two equally suited syntactic frames for the same propositional 
content are activated and the processor, instead of selecting one, 
blends parts of both frames into a new hybrid phrase.

Early phrase blends tend to be local, involving two individual lexical 
items whereas later, they become more global, involving advanced 
syntactic knowledge and necessitating quite complex planning of multi-
phrasal sentences (p 474).

EVALUTION OF THE BOOK

With ''Kids' slips'', JJJ has put forward the biggest collection of 
children's slips to date, analyzed with an unprecedented level of 
systematicity and specificity. This is the standard work on children's 
slips -- an absolute must for every researcher in the field of language 
acquisition and language production. ''Kids' slips'' is a highly significant 
contribution to the field of ''developmental psycholinguistics'' in that it 
investigates the on-line production of spoken language in young 
children. Besides the impressive data base, the merits of this study lie 
specifically in the theoretical explanation of the empirical data and 
phenomena. JJJ shows in an illuminating way how children's SOTs 
bear on specific research questions and longstanding controversies in 
child language research.

In the following, I would like to highlight the main methodological 
advantages (M1-M6), point out some problems (P1-4) and then 
discuss some recurrent themes of the book (R1-R5).

JJJ sets very high methodological standards and lives up to them on 
every of the 727 pages of this monograph.

M1: OBJECTIVITY, RELIABILITY, AND VALIDITY: JJJ has taken great 
pains to transcribe the children's utterances phonetically -- which 
requires a decent amount of ''multi-tasking'' at the time they were 
collected: being attentive and swift so as to notice the slip in the first 
place, then bringing to bear her excellent competence in 
phonetics/phonology to the task of noting down the slip as accurate as 
possible while managing the ongoing complex everyday situation in 
which the slip occurred. With such a detailed phonetic representation, 
a basic requirement of objectivity of the data collection is satisfied. 
The reliability of the data classification can be taken for granted since 
she analyzes the child data base with the same classification system 
as for the adults. With respect to the validity of the inferences drawn 
from the data analysis, it is an indispensable necessity of the collector 
to know the current competence of the children under observation, in 
order to tease apart true performance errors (the SOTs) from 
competence errors due to the ongoing development (pp 11ff). To fulfill 
this requirement to the highest extent possible is a privilege of a 
linguist-mother who, in a short and precious period of life, integrates 
the otherwise contradictory twofold preoccupations of exhaustive daily 
child care and excellent scientific research. By comparing the 
children's slips to an adult reference corpus, she can factor out the 
developmental effects which are at the heart of her study.

M2: THEORY-NEUTRAL FRAMEWORK: It is JJJ's explicit intention to 
make her data collection available to researchers from various 
theoretical approaches to language production  (e.g., serial-modular 
vs. interaction) as well as language acquisition. Therefore, she has 
abstained from too narrow an analysis and rather chose some very 
broad conceptions of language production and development such as 
the 'competing plans hypothesis' (Baars, 1992) as an explanation of 
the mechanisms behind SOTs and the 'frame-content metaphor' 
(MacNeilage, 1998, MacNeilage and Davis, 1993) as an account of 
language production development. However, she also takes a firm 
stand with respect to the model in terms of which she analyzes her 
data, viz. the Representations and Processing Components (RPC) 
Model of Speech Production Planning, which is an advancement of 
the Levelt model. She explicitly invites scholars from different accounts 
to re-analyze her data in terms of their own models and encourages 
them to collect children's slips in other languages in order to be able 
to make cross-linguistic comparisons -- a big desideratum for future 
research. 

M3: COMPARISON WITH OTHER CHILD SLIP CORPORA: At the 
same time she always compares her own results to those of other 
child slip researchers, namely Stemberger (1989), Warren (1986), 
Aitchison & Straf (1982), Poulisse (1999), and Wijnen (1992) as well 
as to other adult corpora. Most of the times, her results converge with 
those of the others. At times, however, she finds differences which call 
for an explanation. In her comparison of the proportion of 
paradigmatic lexical substitution errors which are related by semantics 
or only by phonology, for example, she looks at eight different 
corpora, child and adult. Although the numbers vary greatly from study 
to study, they yield converging evidence for a prevalence of semantic 
over formal errors. Differences in the samples stem from different 
methodologies and classification systems.  In this respect, she 
underlines again the need for a common methodology and fully explicit 
classification criteria (p 253). But obviously it is also sample size which 
matters. While there are many large-scale adult slip corpora, hers is 
the first child slip corpus at a comparable scale. Without belittling the 
wealth and value of the other child corpora, JJJ's corpus sets the 
standards for future child SOT research.

M4: HYPOTHESIS-TESTING: Related to her theory-neutral stance in 
her basic methodology, she applies a classical hypothesis-testing 
approach to her empirical data. She formulates a hypothesis, tests it 
against her corpora, and explains the results in terms of her RPC 
model. With respect to alternative models,  she always makes explicit 
what the data should look like if they were to fit in a specific model. To 
give an example, she asks if there is feedback from the formal to the 
semantic level in the child processor -- a hotly debated topic between 
modular-serial and interactive models. From the lack of any formal 
similarity in children's semantic substitutions she concludes that this is 
most likely not the case (p 373). However, she does not conclude that 
the interactive model is wrong, since (i) the effect is found in the adult 
data of hers and other researchers and (ii) its lack in children can be 
explained independently, e.g., in terms of their weaker monitoring 
capabilities.

M5. NOVEL MEASURES: In her hypothesis testing approach, JJJ 
often has developed novel measures or refined existing ones in order 
to answer very specific questions, e.g., a measure of semantic 
similarity between the two interactants in lexical errors or a score of 
multiple converging influences on lexical errors. As for semantic 
similarity, she comes up with seven categories (coordinate, 
subsumative, contrastive, associative, and opposed relations, 
synonyms, and pronouns), each with even finer subcategories to 
which she submits the subset of lexical errors. She can show that it is 
the opposed category which provides the first strong semantic 
coupling between items, such as 'Mommy-Daddy', 'Bert-Ernie', and 
that only later more taxonomic categories (co-hyponyms) are 
established. Thus, concrete, frequent, and closely linked pairs are the 
seeds of a later more refined and comprehensive lexical-categorical 
system. As for the multiple motivations of lexical slips she has ranked 
10 influences according to their causal strength and has determined 
how many of them are found in each slip: (i) same lexical category, (ii) 
semantic similarity, (iii) tonic stress, (iv) phonological similarity, (v) 
utterance, (vi) weight, (vii -- x) various environmental and discourse 
related influences (pp 282ff). She found that the most common 
situation for both child and adult errors was that 3-4 influences 
conspired in a lexical slip (3 for paradigmatic, 4 for syntagmatic slips), 
suggesting that the planning mechanisms and lexical representations 
are the same for children and adults. Some of these novel measures 
are used for establishing baselines of chance frequencies against 
which the frequencies of particular slip categories of features are 
tested -- a very laborious undertaking but an indispensable control if 
valid claims about effects are to be made.

M6. HYPOTHESIS-GENERATOR: The greatest asset of her analyses 
is, however, not for direct reading but may only become realized in 
future research. What I find most intriguing in this book is that it may 
be used as an immensely rich generator of hypotheses to be tested in 
subsequent experiments. The problems JJJ asks herself are so 
precise and the application of the results in terms of particular models 
are so informative that a straightforward translation of the problem into 
a concrete experimental design is often self-evident. There is a whole 
set of problems that lends itself to further experimental testing, such 
as the lack of clear demarcation of syllables and distinction of the 
syllable position in young children < 2 years of age, the preference for 
binary oppositions in conceptualization, the interference of language 
production by contextual distractors, or the stronger coupling of 
production and perception, to name but a few. Any child 
psycholinguist will greatly appreciate the research impetus by JJJ's 
findings, providing a basis for further experimentation. The field of 
developmental psycholinguistics would immensely benefit if such an 
extended research cycle -- a broad corpus study followed by specific 
experiments enabling a reappraisal of the original findings -- could be 
established in child slip research. It is only recently that the synergy 
arising from the integration of different kinds of linguistic evidence -- 
through corpus linguistics and experimental approaches -- has 
become widely acknowledged (Kepser and Reis, 2005).

There are a couple of problematic aspects which make the reading 
and working through of this exceptional book quite hard sometimes. 
Having said this, I hasten to add that these problems are partly 
inevitably, given the very nature of the data.

P1: QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS: This is the most 
comprehensive book about children's slips ever written with the 
biggest corpus of children's slips ever collected. This wealth of data is 
a mercy and a curse at the same time. On the one hand, slips are 
probabilistic in nature and major insights can be gained by looking at 
statistical distributions and frequencies, as in a nomothetic/quantitative 
approach. On the other hand, each slip is unique and deserves a 
careful analysis on its own, as in an idiomatic/qualitative approach. JJJ 
runs the risk of giving a too in-depth account of single slips and 
getting lost in too many details, at times, e.g., what the semantic 
differences between 'holes' and 'patches' are in a semantic 
substitution (p 362). After having gathered all these slips, Jaeger falls 
prey of hunting down each single one in her analysis until it has 
revealed all its marvels to us. However, this weakness is readily 
forgiven, since it is scientifically highly satisfying to follow JJJ through 
all the ramifications of e.g. the phonological structure of a particular 
SOT. After all, each single slip is a universe and deserves being 
admired for its intricacy and beauty, take for example the meanwhile 
legendary slip ''Not by the chair of my hinny 
hin hin'' (Jaeger, 1992). Moreover, this meticulous 
analysis is greatly amended for by excellent summaries at the end of 
each chapter and subchapter.

P2: ANALYSIS TECHNIQUE: The major analytic tool JJJ uses is 
descriptive frequency statistics, which she displays in tables. Overall, 
this monograph contains 91 tables which resemble each other very 
closely. In a typical table, the frequencies of slip types XYZ are 
tabulated at the ages 1,2,3,4, and 5, a total is drawn an compared to 
the adults. But honestly, what else can one do about a slip corpus? 
JJJ has excessively exploited the tool of descriptive statistics and has 
gained major insights in doing so. She has made the best of this plain 
methodology, risking to bore the reader at times. Also, the lack of any 
inferential statistics is not worth complaining, as JJJ notes herself (p 
48). Not much would be gained, indeed, by knowing that e.g. the 
frequencies for malapropisms in children vs. adults differ significantly. 
The only reasonable thing one can do about differences in the 
distributions, be they big or small, is to come up with good 
explanations in terms of a processing and developmental model and 
to look for further evidence corroborating particular findings. The 
search for novel measures (see M5) is surely related to the somewhat 
restricted statistical possibilities of analyzing the data. 

P3. CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM: There is a slight oddity in the 
classification system insofar as JJJ does not primarily classify SOTs in 
terms of error unit (segment, morpheme, word, phrase) but with 
respect to processing stage, directionality, and form of the error. This 
is fine but in the case of lexical errors it leads to an artificial disruption 
of the unit 'word' which appears twice, on the two processing 
levels, 'lexical' and 'syntactic'. While it is certainly true that 
paradigmatic semantic substitutions and syntagmatic word 
anticipations occur on different processing levels, they involve the 
same unit, though. This division is actually overcome in chapter (4) on 
lexical errors where she looks at e.g. semantic and phonological 
similarity of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic lexical errors. This is 
not to say that her classification system is wrong -- it is not. It is just a 
matter of perspective. A unit such as 'word' can be involved in 
different kinds of errors on different stages of processing (lemma 
retrieval, syntactic serialization). However, the unit 'word' can also be 
tracked across processing levels. 

P4. ERRATA: As is inevitable in such an opus, there are some very 
minor errors and typos. They are not the least disruptive and most of 
them will go unnoticed by the reader anyway. JJJ has registered them 
faithfully in a list of errata, which she kindly made available to me. 
Those who have bought the book may address JJJ by e-mail and ask 
her to send them the list of errata. The errors will certainly be 
corrected in the next edition of this book.

There are a couple of recurrent themes in this book relating to deep 
issues of language production and development. 

R1. THE FRAME-CONTENT METAPHOR: JJJ finds MacNeilage's 
(1998, MacNeilage and Davis, 1993) 'frame-content' metaphor very 
well suited to account for the development in various processing 
domains, namely in phonology (where segments are filled into the 
slots of syllabic frames), morphology (where morphemes are fit into 
word frames), and syntax (where words are inserted into phrasal or 
sentential templates). A principled explanation of this similarity across 
structural levels is given by MacNeilage and Davies in terms of a 
species-specific organizational property of speech. In the evolution of 
the speech production process, independent control of structural 
frames and their content has emerged, possibly sustained by different 
cortical areas. In language production, the 'slots-and-filler model' of 
Shattuck-Hufnagel (1979) and subsequent models provide an 
explanation of how slots in a planned word become filled with 
segments, thus accounting for serialization and also for errors of 
serialization. 

R2. PARALLEL BETWEEN PHONOLOGICAL AND SYNTACTIC 
DEVELOPMENT: JJJ finds striking evidence for the coincidence of 
serialization of segments within syllables with the onset of syntax at 
around 2;2 years of age (for a diagrammatic representation of the 
acquisition of syllable structure, see p 183). She accounts for this 
parallel in terms of a general systems strategy of dealing with growing 
complexity. ''Thus this linearization seems to appear throughout the 
linguistic system at approximately the same point in time, as the child's 
utterances become more complex and require a higher level of 
organization'' (p 183). The issue of linearization is intimately related to 
the frames-content issue above. The frames, in MacNeilage's terms, 
allow for the content units to become linearized by inserting them into 
the frame's pre-specified slots. From a generative perspective, the 
relation between hierarchy and linear order has most thoroughly been 
discussed by Kayne (1993). His 'Linear Correspondence Axiom' (LCA) 
requires the syntactic phrase marker to exclusively specify binary a-
symmetric relations between structural positions such as specifier and 
head or head and complement so that the respective terminal 
elements (words) will not be in too symmetric a relation to one 
another. Only through asymmetry can an unambiguous linearization of 
elements be provided. Linearity is a crucial constraint on the 
articulatory-perceptual interface of spoken languages since the single 
temporal dimension of speech requires units to become strictly 
serialized. Syntagmatic errors and blends are speech errors that 
relate to this major constraint on language processing. JJJ has shown 
in the respective chapters how this ability evolves simultaneously 
across units (segments, morphemes, words) and levels of processing 
(phonological, morphological, and syntactic). In phonology, this 
development -- first frame, then content -- leads to the emergence of 
segments as basic content units and syllables instead of words as 
basic supra-segmental frames. Until the second year of life, around 
2;2, infants entertain a holistic representation of the whole word as a 
frame which, successively, is refined into a syllabic representation 
which is now a linear and hierarchical structure with highly specific 
phonological content. In this respect, Levelt speaks of 
the 'phonologization of the lexicon' (1998, 175): by way of indexing 
structural positions such as onset, nucleus, and coda with matching 
consonants and vowels of the word, the child becomes able to 
distinguish huge numbers of syllabic gestures in the syllabary and 
thereby creates the precondition for rapidly acquiring more lexical 
items, as in the vocabulary spurt. According to Levelt, the 
phonologization of the lexicon is followed by the 'grammaticalization of 
the lexicon' at around 2;6 years of age. It is now the lemma 
information which becomes refined as to include information about the 
argument structure and theta grid of verbs. With this information, the 
processor can build up hierarchical sentential frames into which words 
are inserted.  Note that JJJ assumes a coincidence of phonologization 
and grammaticalization of the lexicon whereas Levelt assumes a slight 
developmental prominence of the former over the latter. Both 
accounts, however, capture the important insight of a parallel 
structural development and also give the same explanation in terms of 
an emergent strategy of dealing with growing complexity.

R3. PARALLEL BETWEEN NOUNS AND CONSONANTS AND VERBS 
AND VOWELS: Another aspect of this parallel is manifested in the 
similarity in the behavior of nouns and consonant on the one hand 
and verbs and vowels in SOTs on the other hand. Both nouns and 
consonants are affected by slips above average, verbs and vowels, 
however, below average (even if frequency is controlled for). Why is 
this so? JJJ reasons that verbs as well as vowels are the core anchor 
of their respective structures, the syllable and the phrase. Their 
selection is a central issue on which the system obviously spends 
considerable effort. The significance of this parallel behavior is most 
clearly expressed in Carstairs-McCarthy's (1999) assumption that the 
noun-verb distinction actually derived from the consonant-vowel 
distinction as its evolutionary antecedent. Crucially, both nouns and 
consonants occupy parallel structural positions around the nucleus -- 
consonants occupy onset and coda positions, nouns occupy specifier 
and complement positions. Vowels occupy the nucleus in a syllable 
and verbs the head position in a phrase, respectively.

R4. THE ROLE OF LEXICON SIZE: Young children build up a mental 
lexicon in an amazingly short time. JJJ discusses how the lexicon 
develops with respect to the two major dimensions -- meaning and 
form. Form does not play a role in very young children's lexicons. 
Semantics, however, is relevant from the very beginning. She traces 
how the complex semantic network of adults with various taxonomic 
levels in the vertical dimension emerges from the first simple, 
concrete, binary oppositions such as 'Mommy -- Daddy', 'Bert -- 
Ernie', 'see -- hear' which only exist on a horizontal plane. She argues 
that lexicon size is the crucial driving force behind structure-building in 
the lexicon leading not only to an intricate semantic network but also 
to the emergence of morphology as an interface between form and 
meaning. It is the increasing number of lexical entries (of increasing 
length) which necessitates a formal morphological analysis. There has 
to be a rich substrate from which semantic as well as morphological 
dimensions can be factored out. This factoring out leads to a more 
coherent organization of lexical elements in terms of lexical semantics 
and morpho-phonological structure. Again, hierarchical structure is an 
emergent solution to the problem of handling a critical mass of lexical 
items in an economic way.

R5. INFLECTION vs. DERIVATION: Inflected and derived words 
behave differently in processing, as is well known. In the Levelt model, 
this difference is accounted for by treating inflected words such 
as ''read -- read-s'' as a single lemma (with diacritics for the functional 
information added by the inflection) but treating derived words such 
as ''read -- read-er'' as separate lemmas. JJJ accumulates rich 
evidence that inflected and derived words also behave differently in 
child SOTs. That inflectional suffixes are (i) only loosely integrated into 
their host word, (ii) extra-syllabic, (iii) detach more easily (iv) belong to 
syntax more closely is evidenced by a higher frequency of morpheme 
shifts (''bubble-s gum_''), stranding errors (''my run is 
nos-ing''), suffix substitution (''turn-ing'' <-- talk-
ing) (p 409), and suffix adding. That derivational suffixes show exactly 
the opposite behavior is evidenced by SOTs such as ''cold'' <--
 clos-ed where an un-derived word (''cold'') substitutes for a 
derived word (''closed''), without stranding its derivational suffix (*cold-
ed, p 413). For the same reason, stranding errors and suffix 
substitutions are rarer with derived words. Thus, the different 
representation of derivational and inflectional morphology is also 
corroborated by child and adult SOTs.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

''Kids' slips'' is JJJ's life work. It has only become possible by the 
curiosity and versatility of a very attentive mother-linguist observing 
her three children growing up and acquiring language during the first 
five years of their lives. Later on it required a decent amount of 
stamina to sift the more than thousand SOTs and to analyze them 
which she did with admirable accuracy and specificity. The fruits of 
this long lasting enterprise are now available to the benefit of all. JJJ 
explicitly invites us to re-analyze her data or to start collecting 
children's slips in the same way as she did, preferably cross-
linguistically, so as to evaluate and extend her findings in the future. 

REFERENCES

Aitchison, J. and Straf, M. (1992). Lexical storage and retrieval: A 
developing skill? In: A. Cutler (Ed.), Slips of the tongue and language 
production, 197-241. The Hague: Mouton.

Baars, B. (1992). A dozen competing-plan techniques for eliciting 
predictable slips in speech and action. In B.J. Baars (ed.), 
Experimental slips and human error: Exploring the architecture of 
volition, 129-150. Plenum Press, New York.

Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (1999) The Origins of Complex Language: An 
Inquiry into the Evolutionary Beginnings of Sentences, Syllables and 
Truth. Oxford : Oxford University Press. 

Jaeger, J. J. (1992): Not by the chair of my hinny hin hin: Some 
general properties of slips of the tongue in young children. Journal of 
Child Language, 19, 335-366.

Kayne, R. (1993): The antisymmetry of syntax. Linguistic Inquiry 
Monographs 25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kepser, S. and Reis, M. (2005): Linguistic evidence. Empirical, 
theoretical and computational perspectives. Studies in Generative 
Grammar, 85. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 

Levelt, W. J.M (1989). Speaking. From intention to articulation. 
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Levelt, W. J.M (1998). The genetic perspective in psycholinguistics or 
where do spoken words come from? Journal of Psycholinguistic 
Research, 27, 167-180. 

Levelt, W. J.M., Roelofs, A., and Meyer, A. S. (1999): A theory of 
lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 
22, 1-75.

MacNeilage, P. F. (1998). The frame/content metaphor of evolution of 
speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 499-511.

MacNeilage, P. and Davis, B. (1993). Motor explanation of babbling 
and early speech patterns. In B. de Boysson-Bardies, S. de Schonen, 
P. Jusczyk, P. MacNeilage and J. Morton (Eds.), Developmental 
neurocognition: Speech and face processing in the first year of life. 
Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Poulisse, N. (1999). Slips of the tongue: Speech errors in first and 
second language production. Studies in Bilingualism 20. Amsterdam: 
Benjamins.

Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (1979). Speech errors as evidence for a serial-
ordering mechanism in sentence production. In W.E. Cooper, and 
E.T.C. Walker (Eds.), Sentence processing: Psycholinguistic studies 
presented to M.F. Garrett, 295-342. Hillsdale, NJ. 

Stemberger, J. P. (1989). Speech errors in early child language 
production. Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 164-188.

Warren, H. (1986). Slips of the tongue in very young children. Journal 
of Psycholinguistic Research, 15, 309-344.

Wijnen, Frank (1992). Incidental word and sound errors in young 
speakers. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 734-755. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Annette Hohenberger is a German psycholinguist who has done 
research on first language acquisition, spoken and sign language 
production, and the early cognitive development of infants. In 
particular, she has done research on slips of the hand and tongue 
and collected a (yet unpublished) extensive corpus of German child 
slips.

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