Abstract
Three interrelated puzzles have been haunting my work on speech errors, almost since it began in 1965. The awareness puzzle is one, and it consists of two parts. Part 1 of the awareness puzzle concerns relations between awareness and the “adjustments” or accommodations that often follow the production of errors. For example, the speaker who misproduced “cow tracks” as “track cowz” (Garrett, 1980; see also MacKay, 1979) selected the appropriate context-dependent plural unconsciously from among the three alternatives that English allows (/z/, /ez/, and /s/) for the transposed word track. The unconscious nature of these ”context-sensitive accommodations” indicates that speakers can choose unconsciously among alternative outputs, contrary to the proposal of Reason (1984) and others that unconscious processes are inflexible and that only conscious processes are sensitive to context and capable of choice. Context-sensitive accommodations also undermine Marcel’s proposal (1983) that choice among actions can serve as a criterion for consciousness. The puzzle is how these unconscious choices are made.
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Mackay, D.G. (1992). Errors, Ambiguity, and Awareness in Language Perception and Production. In: Baars, B.J. (eds) Experimental Slips and Human Error. Cognition and Language. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1164-3_2
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