Morphological errors in casual conversation.

Abstract

Occasionally, listeners' strategies for dealing with casual speech lead them into an erroneous perception of the intended message-a slip of the ear. When such errors occur, listeners report hearing, as clearly and distinctly as any correctly perceived stretch of speech, something that does not correspond to the speakers' utterance. From a collection of almost 1000 examples of misperceptions in English conversation, perceptual errors involving morphology suggest that listeners expect monomorphemic forms and treat phonological information as primary. Listeners are not particularly attentive to morphological information and may supply inflectional morphemes as needed by context.