Longman Dictionary of

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speech pathology
the president of Prance instead of the president of France
c reversal error, also spoonerism: when the position of sounds, syllables,
or words is reversed, For example:
let’s have chish and fips instead let’s have fish and chips
Speech errors have been studied by psycholinguists in order to find out
how people store language items in long-term memory and how they
select items from memory when speaking.
see also MEMORY
speech event n
a particular instance when people exchange speech, e.g. an exchange of
greetings, an enquiry, a conversation. For example:
Child: Mum, where’s my red sweater?
Mother: Bottom drawer in your bedroom.
Child: Right, I’ll have a look.
Speech events are governed by rules and norms for the use of speech,
which may be different in different communities. The structure of
speech events varies considerably according to the GENRE they belong
to.
The components of a speech event are its SETTING, the PARTICIPANTs and
their ROLE RELATIONSHIPs, the MESSAGE, the key (see KEY 1 ) and the CHAN-
NEL.
The term speech situation is sometimes used instead of speech event, but
usually it refers to any situation which is associated with speech, e.g. a
classroom lesson, a party.
A speech situation may consist of just one speech event, e.g. two people
meeting in the street and having a brief conversation, or it may contain a
number of speech events, some going on at the same time, e.g. a large
dinner party.
speech marker n
a linguistic feature which may give an indication of the speaker’s age, sex,
ethnicity or social group. A speech marker could be a particular sound,
e.g. the pronunciation of /r/ in New York, or /ei/ in today in Australia. It
could be a syntactic structure, e.g. between my husband and I/me, or a
word or expression.
see also VARIABLE 1
speech pathology n
the study of abnormalities in the development and use of language in children
and adults (such as STUTTERING and APHASIA). Speech pathology
includes the diagnosis of such disorders and the development of
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