Taking Language for Granite: On the Comprehensibility of Malapropisms
Methods
Experiment
Ariel James, Melody Dye & Michael Ramscar
Department of Psychology, Stanford University
Our data suggest that the participants in our experiment were not passive listeners. Rather than waiting for each word to be voiced, they are actively building
expectations about the words that they heard.
So long as listeners knew the words in the stories, their overall ability to recall both the malapropisms and the normal words was increased by the frequency of the preceding context.
For normal words, the more predictable the context was, the better participants recalled them, whereas for the malapropisms, increasing uncertainty increased recall.
Listeners’ don’t just listen, they predict. The reason we understand malapropisms is because, in a sense, we don’t hear them. Instead, our expectations about what people will say construct interpretations as we listen The role of the listener should not be taken for granite!
“Rather than take for granite that Ace talks straight, a listener must be on guard for an occasional entre nous and me… or a long face no see. In a roustabout way, he will maneuver until he selects the ideal phrase for the situation, hitting the nail right on the thumb. The careful conversationalist might try to mix it up with him in a baffle of wits. In quest of this pinochle of success, I have often wrecked my brain for a clowning achievement, but Ace’s chickens always come home to roast. From time to time, Ace will, in a jerksome way, monotonize the conversation with witticicisms too humorous to mention. It’s high noon someone beat him at his own game. I have never done it: cross my eyes and hope to die, he always wins thumbs down.”
Donald Davidson, “A nice derangement of epitaphs”
Malapropisms, slips of the tongue, and other subtle verbal gaffes are common in everyday speech, yet listeners can fill in the gaps with little difficulty. The question is: how do listeners understand a speaker's meaning when the speaker makes an error?
One explanation is that language comprehension is shaped by expectation—listeners predict upcoming discourse as they are listening to a conversation unfold.
Indeed, prior studies have suggested that prediction- based processing may operate at multiple levels within discourse. We suspect that listeners are often able to cope with speech errors, in part, because much of everyday speech is made of highly familiar words and phrases, and thus, listening involves predicting (probabilistically) the correct word or turn of phrase even when what you actually hear is in error.
This suggests that when a combination of words a speaker uses are unfamiliar, listeners may be worse at parsing malapropisms, and concurrently, more likely to notice them as errors. Low-frequency word sequences are less predictable in speech, and so we
hypothesized that they would increase uncertainty in listeners. This would increase the attention that they needed to pay to the words they were hearing. This in turn should make malapropisms easier to detect and remember.
Abstract Methods
Mrs. Malaprop says, “Mind your Mallards” Results
From the scores on the forced choice task (Figure 1), we grouped participants into three categories: high, middle, and low familiarity.
We compared the three groups on their fill-in-the-blank verbatim recall accuracy. The four conditions studied are those where they filled in a malapropism in either a low or high frequency context, and those where they filled in a normal word in either context. The results were analyzed using a 2 (frequency, high versus low) x 2 (word-type, normal vs malapropism) x 2 (familiarity, with the normal vs malapropism words), see Figure 2.
This showed that participants were better overall at recalling the normal words than the malapropisms (F(1,24)=29.668, p<0.0001), but that their overall recall was influenced both by familiarity (F(4,24)=3.11, p<0.05) and importantly, there was an interaction between the frequency of the preceding sentence and whether or not the recalled word was normal or a malapropism (F(1,24)=5.554, p<0.05).
Recall of the words was affected by how well they knew them, whether they were presented in a normal context or as a malapropism, and by the predictability of the context in which the heard the words.
Discussion Participants: 38 adults from the Stanford community.
Directions: Participants were told to listen closely to a narrative and prepare to be tested on verbatim recall and comprehension.
The narrative consisted of 24 short (2-3 sentence) paragraphs.
Across conditions, each of these paragraphs could have a malapropism or not. These sentences were otherwise held constant across the trials, and the preceding sentences were made more or less predictable to manipulate uncertainty. Participants listened to 3 paragraphs at a time before going on to the block of questions.
Examples
“I took a deep breath when I sat in my chair. Despite everything, I decided to put my best foot forward.” (HiFreq/Norm)
“I took a deep breath when I sat in my chair. Despite everything, I decided to put my best foot froward.” (HiFreq/Mal)
“I took a deep inhalation when I sat in my chair. Despite everything, I decided to put my best foot forward.” (LoFreq/Norm)
“I took a deep inhalation when I sat in my chair. Despite everything, I decided to put my best foot froward.” (LoFreq/Mal)
Each of the 8 question blocks contained 3 fill-in-the-blank recall questions, as well as 3 true/false questions on content.
Finally, in a forced choice task, participants were asked to listen to pairs of phrases taken from the narrative and identify which one is correct (not a malapropism), regardless of what they heard in the story.
High Middle Low
Forced Choice Score %
96±.
03
83±.
05
63±.
07
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Participants
