THE NEIGHBORHOOD CHARACTERISTICS OF MALAPROPISMS

This study examined the phonological neighborhood characteristics (fre quency, density, and neighborhood frequency) of 138 malapropisms. Mala propisms are whole word substitutions that are phonologically, but not semantically, related. A statistical analysis of a speech error corpu s suggests that neighborhood density and word frequency differentially affected the number of malapropisms. Specifically, a greater number o f malapropisms were found among high frequency words with dense neighb orhoods than with sparse neighborhoods. Exactly the opposite pattern w as found among low frequency words. That is, more errors were found am ong low frequency words with spar se neighborhoods than with dense nei ghborhoods. More malapropisms resided in low frequency neighborhoods t han in high. The average word frequency, average neighborhood density, and average neighborhood frequency of the malapropisms were significa ntly lower than the same averages computed from randomly sampled contr ol words. Finally, more target words were replaced by error words that had relatively higher frequency than by error words that had relative ly lower frequency. The implications of these findings for models of l exical representation and processing are discussed.