Lexical bias re-re-visited. some further data on its possible cause

This paper describes an experiment eliciting spoonerisms by using the so-called SLIP technique. The purpose of the experiment was to provide a further test of the hypothesis that self-monitoring of inner speech is a major source of lexical bias ([1; 10; 11; 14]. This is a follow-up on an earlier experiment in which subjects were explicitly prompted after each response to make a correction in case of a speech error. In the current experiment both the prompt and the extra time for correction were left out, and there was no strong time pressure for the subject in giving his response. It is shown that under these conditions many primed-for spoonerisms are replaced by other, mostly lexical, errors. These ‘replacing’ or ‘secondary’ errors are more frequent in the condition priming for nonword-nonword errors than in the condition priming for word-word errors. Response times obtained for replacing errors are considerably and significantly longer than response times for overtly interrupted errors, and also longer than response times for the primed-for spoonerisms. This suggests that a time-consuming operation follows the primed-for spoonerisms in inner speech, and replaces those with other speech errors, often to preserve lexicality of the error.