Lexical bias revisited: Detecting, rejecting and repairing speech errors in inner speech ?
This paper confirms and exploits the observation that early overt self-interruptions and repairs of phonological speech errors very likely are reactions to inner speech, not to overt speech. In an experiment eliciting wordword and nonwordnonword phonological spoonerisms it is found that self-interruptions and repairs come in two classes, one class of reactions to inner speech, another with reactions to overt speech. It is also found that in inner speech nonwordnonword spoonerisms are more often rejected than wordword spoonerisms. This is mirrored in the set of completed spoonerisms where wordword spoonerisms are more frequent than nonwordnonword ones. This finding supports a classical but controversial explanation of the well-known lexical bias effect from nonwords being rejected more frequently than real words in inner speech. This explanation is further supported by an increasing number of overt rejections of nonwordnonword spoonerisms with phonetic distance between error and target, and increasing lexical bias with phonetic distance. It is concluded that the most likely cause of lexical bias in phonological speech errors is that nonword errors are more often detected, rejected, and repaired than real-word errors in self-monitoring of inner speech.
lexical bias speech errors self-monitoring production