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)
Written anticipation errors basically come in two types: those that are
a result of a processing mistake in the ordering of the sentence, and those
that are the result of errors in the motor commands involved in writing.
The mechanisms involved in the first type are usually rather high-level
ones that only incidentally involve writing, and the issues raised in such
errors are not much different from those raised in the examination of
spoken anticipations. The second type is more low-level and involves the
character components themselves, or other aspects of the writing system.
We will deal only with the second type here.
One of the most common kinds of written anticipation errors is when a
character component about to be written appears prematurely, usually in
part due to some visual similarity to the target component:
3 9,
Ex* 85- ''g * ($2 g ,%)
"Zhgn me'i [yisi I" ("Really un[interesting] .")
The El component of g, and the component of ,g share the same
rectangular outline (the first three strokes are exactly the same), and this
caused the component a to be anticipated. Note that this state of affairs
has something in common with a capture error, though a capture error does
not typically involve interference from a word or shape already in the
- processing stack waiting to be executed.
If a character component has to be repeated two or three times in the
writing of a character, this can contribute to the component being
anticipated:
.J\
Ex* 86. &&;ei ij IyJ 8 5 El ;fs 4% ,y
"Xifang de yinyu\e ne, y6u xigo [tiqin]
violin I...')
(.J\ t: F)
...' ("As for Western music, there's [the
The implicit knowledge that two instances of the component 5 were about
to be written caused a premature motor command to execute the
component during the writing of $g.
Ex. 87. "f&F ag,f& " (B @ 3
"Ta bfich'mg, t3 [sgngzi I..' ("He didn't sing, his [voice] ...")
Similarly, the character component was anticipated as the writer began
to write @.