Units of Processing in Sentence Production: Evidence from Speech Errors.

ABSTRACT This paper adopts the activation spreading theory to explore how lexical items are accessed. Approximately 3300 errors from both public sources and ordinary conversation in Japanese are analyzed. Analyses suggest that there are two types of environment in which contextual lexical errors occur, and that these two types of environment correspond to two types of processing units. Adjacent elements may be an important processing unit at the syntactic and phonological level. (JP)