Spontaneity of Speech Errors: A Diagnostic Psycholinguistic Case Study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to use speech errors as a verbal means of communication to clarify the psychological aspects of George W. Bush’s character. Bush’s character is chosen for being highly controversial, having received the lowest approval rating in 2008 and the highest approval rating after the September 11 attacks. To achieve the aim of this study, a psycholinguistic approach is adopted in addition to a speech production model set by Dell (1999), and Chang and Griffin (1999). Some of Bush’s spontaneous errors are supposed to be collected, and then categorized from a psycholinguistic perspective and finally analyzed statistically. The main results of the study can be summed in the following points. (a) The phonological and morphological errors, caused by the psychological priming, reveal how much perplexity and confusion Bush has experienced. (b) Bush’s Freudian slips—caused by psycho-physiological factors, such as fatigue, excitement, and distraction—reveal the fact that he is not an open outright president as he represses many thoughts and feelings more than he shows. (c) Bush’s syntactic errors, caused by the improper lexical insertion, reveal his poor linguistic competence; the matter that reveals low intelligence for many psychologists such as Pishghadam and Shams (2012). (d) The economical use of speech disfluencies, caused by problems in the recognition system, reveals that Bush has a tendency of rashness. That is, he may take rapid incorrect decisions that lead to catastrophes.

A Cross-linguistic Analysis of Formulaic Language and Meta-discourse in Linguistics Research Articles by Natives and Arabs: Modeling Saudis and Egyptians

“…The closeness rates can be attributed to the Egyptian researchers' keen desire to represent and emphasize their stances in every situation. This finding goes in harmony with Abdi (2002), Cao (2014), Abdulaal and Abuslema (2020), and Abdollahzadeh (2011) who pointed out that academic articles fall down if their authors do not show clearly their emphatic stances in every single situation. In the Saudi discussion sections, on the other hand, boosters, code glosses, engagement, frame markers, and transitions have reported far rates from the N-level; whereas only attitudes and hedges were much close to the native normal level.…”

“…A general overview of the previous studies on metadiscourse resources showed that metadiscoursal devices varied across different text types such as newspapers (Abdulaal, M., 2020;Yeganeh, Heravi, & Sawari, 2015;Dafouz-Milne, 2008), textbooks (Hyland, 1999;, research articles (Dahl, 2004;Kim & Lim, 2013), academic essays (Hyland, 2007;Adel, 2012;Bruce, 2010), argumentative essays (Anwardeen, Luyee, Gabriel, & Kalajahi, 2013) and theses/dissertations (Hyland, 2010) generated by native and non-native writers of English. Although these research studies focused mostly on the overall frequency of metadiscourse devices, they clearly ignored the functional analysis of the resources.…”

The Effectiveness of Globalized Task-Centered Language Instruction on EFL Learners’ Sustainable Motivation and Syntactic Proficiency

“…In addition to other relevant benefits, mastering grammatical rules helps learners avoid language fossilization and improves their execution. Furthermore, understanding the fundamentals of language structure helps learners become independent thinkers who can manage their learning process even when they are not in school or when there is a time limit on the use of classroom knowledge (Abdulaal & Abuslema, 2020).…”

A Sociocultural Perspective on the Impact of Instructor Versus Peer Scaffolding Upon Lexical Digesting and Reading Perception

“…They go on to say that teaching reading strategies and fostering autonomous readers who can really access all types of materials by themselves is the most beneficial service teachers can offer to their EFL learners (M. A. Abdulaal & Abuslema, 2020).…”