Bernard J. Baars

Covert formulation and editing of anomalies in speech production: Evidence from experimentally elicited slips of the tongue

Models of speech production have been modified in recent years by the addition of an “editing” component, the supposed function of which is to verify the linguistic integrity of covert speech plans, and to prevent anomalous output. Empirical support for editing has been offered by the present authors. That evidence has been challenged, however, on the issue of whether the covert formulation of anomalous potential output in speech production has in fact been demonstrated. The present study provides a more direct test on the question of anomaly formulation by examining laboratory-generated spoonerism errors in which emotionally neutral target words may be transformed into obscene error utterances. Evidence for the covert formulation, and the prearticulatory edit-veto, of anomalous (taboo) potential output is discussed.

Conscious Contents Provide the Nervous System with Coherent, Global Information

Renewed interest in consciousness is evident in contemporary cognitive psychology. While there is reasonable agreement on the empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness, there is less consensus on the shape of a theory. This paper specifies a number of empirical constraints, stated as pairs of conscious-unconscious contrasts, and suggests a rather small set of principles that can organize these constraints in a rather straightforward way. These principles include the following: First, the nervous system is viewed as a “distributed” information processing system, in which highly complex and efficient processing is performed by specialized processors in a relatively independent way. These processors may be “data driven”—i.e., they may decide by their own criteria what is worth processing, so that a central mechanism is not needed to exercise executive power over the specialized processors. However, these specialists do require a “central information exchange” in order to interact with each other. This central interchange has been called a global data base. In operation, a global data base bears a striking resemblance to “working memory.”

Experimental verbal slip studies: A review and an editing model of language encoding

Spoken language is encoded extremely rapidly and by exceedingly complex cognitive operations, yet it is amazingly free of errors. In recent years there has been debate on the question of how the speech‐production system guards itself against erroneous output. One explanation is that the system is sufficiently sophisticated and rule‐governed in its early message‐formulation stages so as generally to avoid constructing anomalous plans. The authors have argued elsewhere, however, for an explanation whereby anomalous and other error plans are formulated during early production stages but are vetoed and corrected (i.e., “edited”) during later encoding stages. We have yet to synthesize these arguments into a coherent encoding model, however, and that is our purpose here. An “Editing” model of speech production is presented, featuring prearticulatory evaluations of impending speech segments via feedback to a spreading‐activation lexicon which is susceptible to semantic, syntactic, phonological, and extralinguist...

Syntactic criteria in prearticulatory editing: Evidence from laboratory-induced slips of the tongue

Earlier studies of laboratory-induced verbal slips have provided a partial model of “prearticulatory editing” in speech production—a cognitive process by which impending phoneme strings are evaluated for their linguistic and extralinguistic integrity prior to articulation. These studies have provided evidence of editing based upon phonotactic, lexical, and semantic criteria. The present study demonstrates the existence of syntactic editing criteria via laboratory-induced spoonerisms. Experiment I demonstrates that syntactically legitimate spoonerism errors (e.g., “mice saw”) are more frequent than syntactically anomalous spoonerism errors (e.g., “mice sees”), suggesting that prearticulatory phonological processing decisions are modified on the basis of syntactic criteria. Experiment II demonstrates that the criteria for syntactically legnitimate spoonerisms can be influenced by aspects of the syntactic context. Implications are discussed.

Polysemantic lexical access: Evidence from laboratory‐induced double entenders 1

The planning of a spoken message presumably includes the consideration of various potential alternatives from which an eventual output version is somehow selected. Models of speech production typically assume that this selection process is influenced by the semantic requirements of the message itself. The possibility that message planning is influenced by factors extrinsic to the intended message is generally neglected, yet the natural speech phenomenon of double entendres provides intuitive evidence that extrinsic factors may in fact influence at least our lexical selections. This study employs two experiments on the double‐entendre phenomenon to investigate the role of extrinsic influences on lexical selection. Experiment I demonstrates that sexual arousal leads to increased encoding of sexual double‐entendre outputs for multiple‐choice cloze‐type sentences, and Experiment II demonstrates the same effect for open‐ended cloze sentences. Results are discussed in terms of two contradictions to contemporary...

Formulation hypotheses revisited: A reply to Stemberger

In his article in this volume, Stemberger (1983) offers a rival explanation for the results of a couple of our studies on laboratory-induced spoonerisms. His claims are perhaps reasonable if we stay within the confines of the particular studies he selected (i.e., Motley, Baars, & Camden, 1981; Motley & Baars, 1975), but even a slightly more thorough review of our research program would require a reexamination of those claims. The studies critiqued are part of a series we have performed to examine laboratory-induced slips of the tongue--most often spoonerisms. Typically, our method has involved having subjects silently read a word-pair list on which certain stimuli are cued as targets for vocalization, and with the two or three stimuli immediately preceding those targets being specially constructed to contain biasing phonological characteristics of the potential spoonerism errors. We call this method SLIP (see Motley & Baars, 1976, for details). Many of these studies have looked at spoonerism frequency as the dependent variable, with an independent variable being the relative linguistic legitimacy (on various criteria) of the error. Consistently, we have found that linguistically legitimate, or normal, errors (e.g., darn bore ~ barn door) outnumber matched but anomalous ones (dart board ~ *bart doard). Our explana-