Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese - Sino-Platonic Papers

David Moser, "Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese" Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 22 (March 199 1 )
any money. Before finding a job, you should...")
Here the homophonic character (qiin,"money") was substituted for
(qi6n. "before"), but the error was clearly facilitated by the fact that the
concept of "money" was already highly active and the character for the
concept had just been written. The slip could also be classified as a
straightforward perseveration error, but it is likely that all three factors -
perseveration, spreading activation, as well as simple homophonic
substitution - contributed something to the result.
There has been much debate about the extent to which speakers of
Chinese utilize the phonetic information in Chinese characters in processing
or producing written text. DeFrancis (1984, 1989), Hung & Tzeng (1981),
and others have argued that, despite its reputation to the contrary, Chinese
script is by any definition of the term a phonetic script, and native
speakers can thus be expected to use the same kinds of mechanisms for
retrieving, writing, or phonetically recoding Chinese characters as speakers
of English use in processing English text. Much of the evidence from
written errors in Chinese also seems to support this view, and the previous
three examples indicate that the processing strategies used by writers of
Chinese characters are similar to those employed by writers of English and
other alphabetic scripts.
If a target word, once retrieved, waits in short-term memory long
enough, very often the result is partial forgetting or "phonetic decay" - a
loss or degradation of the phonological information in the word
(Hotopf,1983). The following are a few examples in English from written
texts:
Ex. 71. "...particularly with this letter ..." (with this weather)
Ex. 72. "I might as well twin around and do it again." (turn around)
Ex. 73. "Okay, so far, find." (so far, fine)
Here as well, we find the same phenomenon in written Chinese:
EX. 74. "I$ **
$$ UE,*q 2 8 A @ @I {$." (a E)
"NY xian 16i ba, *kgding hbi y6u r6n b3ngzh'u n'i.' ("Just come, there will
certainly be someone to help you.")
It seems clear that what was lost here in the process of phonetic decay was
the ending consonant /n/ of "kgn' (R) resulting in the substitution of the