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General and Specific Factors in “Transformational Errors”

An Experimental Study

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Abstract

Recently, there has been a belief in psycholinguistics that Chomsky’s competence model of language (1965) could be extended to account for linguistic performance. Evidence was obtained from a certain class of speech errors made by normal English speakers, such as “Why do you be an oaf sometimes?” Fay (1978, 1980a, b), in particular, has argued that such errors, termed “transformational errors” (TEs) by him, could be explained as a result of the malfunctioning of the transformational mechanism during speech production. His view will be challenged in this chapter, and an alternative explanation that emphasizes such performance factors as competition, time pressure, and mental work load will be discussed.

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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Chen, JY., Baars, B.J. (1992). General and Specific Factors in “Transformational Errors”. 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_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1164-3_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-1166-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-1164-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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