A preliminary look at Spoonerisms

Skinner's view of verbal behavior involves a hierarchy of response units.
For example words are not necessarily units in any particular utterance, but
they often retain some functional significance. The same is true with
smaller units. When we are repeating a very unfamiliar utterance that we
have just heard, our utterance strongly involves our "minimal repertoire" -
units that are part of all of our utterances. The same is true when we
attempt to echo a foreign word or phrase (which may not be completely
possible because of the difference in minimal sounds that characterize
languages).



It is often mistakenly assumed that behaviorism treats all verbal utterances
as a chain of responses where words early in the sentence exert stimulus
control over later words. In some cases this is largely true as in certain
kinds of intraverbals (1-2-3-4 etc.), but this does not characterize other
sorts of utterances. Instead, his view was that, for example, some
circumstance strengthens some core responses (let's look at tacts for the
moment) and then the core responses become temporally organized as a
function of contingencies that produce other units that we call grammar and
syntax (these are autoclitics). The utterance is often emitted as a complete
occurrence, not assembled after "the early parts" are emitted. Skinner felt
that Spoonerisms provided evidence that this, in fact, was the case since
later parts of the response appeared to exert control over earlier parts.
For example we might say "ghouls fold" when identifying iron pyrite in part
because the "guh" sound is a fragment of "ghouls" and, of course, "gold."
Given that the "ools" in fool's is also made more probable, and "ghouls" is
itself likely a unit possessing some probability of occurrence, the
Spoonerism occurs. Thus, utterances are built up sequentially, and inchoate
portions of the early response exert control over the final product, the
sequence of events is not from early words to later words, and doesn't
necessarily involve whole words as the only units. Obviously, it involves
the autoclitic units that comprise the organization of the basic tacts or
mands.



It should be possible to show (at least statistically) that the "erroneous"
statements can be controlled by variables that affect the probability of the
erroneous substitutions. For example, the response "ghouls fold" may be more
probable following exposure to "Halloween themes" or among poker players or
those that practice origami. I recall an article I read some time ago (I
think it was about verbal slips) in which one of the examples given involved
people that were threatened with electric shock (though none was ever really
delivered) for errors in identifying briefly-presented written phrases. In
this group, there was some elevated probability that "worst cottage" would
be reported as the Spoonerism "cursed wattage."


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