Shownotes
In this episode Dr Bisson interviews Dr Zavaleta about her research on speech errors (when you say cat instead of dog or "Platurn" instead of planet because you were also thinking of Saturn... ). Dr Zavaleta explains how speech errors are a normal occurrence especially when we learn another language. Things get muddled up and the wrong word comes out but speech errors are so interesting because they tell us so much about the organisation of language in the brain. Join us for an interesting episode that we can all relate to.
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Follow Dr Zavaleta and Dr Bisson on twitter: @dr_klzavaleta and @mjbisson
Or get in touch via email: kaitlyn.zavaleta@dmu.ac.uk and marie-josee.bisson@dmu.ac.uk
Or via the De Montfort University website: Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta and Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
The Language Scientists Podcast website: languagescientists.our.dmu.ac.uk
Link to Dr Zavaleta and Dr Bisson's research lab: sites.google.com/view/languagelab-dmu
Transcripts
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
If you have a connection to languages, this is the podcast for you. Whether you're a language learner , a language teacher, language researcher, or anyone who's interested in languages.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I'm Dr.Marie-Josee Bisson.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
and I'm Dr. Kaitlyn Zavaleta.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
We are the language scientists and this is our podcast. We're both senior lecturers in psychology at De Montfort University, and we conduct research into the area of language learning. Throughout this series, we hope to translate the science behind language learning into informative and practical advice. So sit back and enjoy.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So Kaitlin, can you tell us before we jump into your topic for today, can you tell us a little bit about your language background?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
I'm a native English speaker. I grew up in the Midwest, in the United States of America, near the Chicago land area. In fact, my first major exposure, exposure to another language was French when Beauty and the Beast came out. And I love that Bonjour song. I love it because it was the first time I realised that there, you know,there are other languages. And this was just mind blowing to me like that. There are all these people speaking other languages and they're having the same conversations. And to me it just feels like I got to get in on that. Basically, I need to know what they're talking about.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So because you took French as a university subject, I don't really know that much about that. So can you tell us a little bit about what kind of stuff would you do as a French major?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah, so I tested out of some of the early years stuff because I'd taken like basically the first couple of years. But then it was heavy on grammar and then we did a lot of classes that were about the culture, but it was exposure to the language through it. So my favourite were in the last couple of years of so I switched from the French major to a French minor, but it was all the same courses, but a lot about French history and French culture and the arts and literature. And for me, I'm a history nerd, so I really enjoyed all that. And how else would you learn the word for sword? And in a text you have to to read, you know, older literature to really. You don't use sword today quite as often. So a lot of courses like that. I took a phonology course, which was actually really interesting and I probably the most useful in my opinion because we really practised what the sounds sounded like, how they're written and how that actually translates to the way you produce the sound, which is very different from what we're used to, is native English speakers. I think most of us, if not all, were native English speakers.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Okay, so what happened after that? So that was the undergraduate degree.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah, that was undergrad. So I don't have a lot of French speakers in my life. So my French has really gotten rusty. The language that has tried to sneak in the door of my mind essentially has been Spanish because my husband is a bilingual English Spanish speaker from birth, so completely mostly balanced as you can be. So we try to speak Spanish here and there around the house just to expose our children to it. And here's the plug for my research whenever I try to speak in Spanish. So my comprehension for Spanish is, I think, pretty good at least because I can listen to the in-laws conversations and all that. But my production comes out in French. Doesn't matter. It's French is what I get. You put Spanish in, and you get French out.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
You get French out, okay?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And so I've had a few other languages I've been exposed to because I was linguistics major. We had to study non-Western. So I studied Arabic for a year and that was fantastic.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
How did you get to become a language researcher?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
I followed this path, so really language is always understanding how people learn and speak. Languages was always just the interest for me. I just didn't know how to articulate that. So when I was in undergrad, I, I so I was a French minor, linguistics major, but I took a class in psycholinguistics and
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Ta dah!
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Ta dah! And at the end of the class, the high performing students were offered an opportunity to apply to be research assistants. And I just thought it was so cool that you present information on a screen, even like a sentence or you present a word and then people mess it up. And then you look at those those issues, those errors, and it tells you about what the mind was doing when when it was, you know, processing this information. So my focus was always on language production and language production errors because I think that the errors are helpful to tell us about what we know and what goes wrong.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So the research kind of infiltrated your life as you were an undergraduate student and then you decided to do a masters, or?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yes. So I did a master's program in psychology in the Cognition and Neural Systems Program at the University of Arizona, specifically chosen because there were lots of bilinguals there. So I really have always been interested in how a bilingual person organises their languages and whether that's someone who has both of those languages fully fluent, super balanced, or someone who like me, has one language that's their their dominant language, but then they have other languages that are less dominant. So how does how does that all work out? How does it all balance?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Okay. And now you.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
and I am here now.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Doing your language research into speech errors. And this is the topic for the podcast today. So do you wanna tell us a little bit more about that?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
The thing to focus on first is that a speech error that I look at is part of language production,and this is the opposite of language comprehension. So when you have a language, you kind of have these two different processes. I guess you could kind of say, so the way you comprehend the language. So if someone is saying something in a specific language, what you understand and what you make sense of, that's your language comprehension. Now, when you want to say something in a different language or in any language, really, that's your language production. That could be you writing, writing a note out. It could be you speaking something. It could be you typing something. All of these are different ways that we produce language and the way we comprehend language and the way we produce language follows different orders. It's almost like a factory. Right. So when we produce a language, we have to plan what we want to say, which means that we have to go into our mind and we have to activate the thing that we want to say, activate the concept, and then we activate the specific word we want to use. So if I am thinking of my pet who is in my home, who is always walking in front of my computer, I am thinking of the furry creature with four legs and a tail that purrs.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I know the one. I know the one.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
You know, the one. So I'm not going to say dog likely, but I might. And that's kind of an example of a speech speaker. So basically a speech error is you started to go down this process of saying a word and you were doing great and then something happened. Now the thing that happened might be you accidentally activated a related word. So dog instead of cat or something that just sounds the same. So I guess you could say cup instead of cat or maybe.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Cap.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yes, that would be a good one. It's only one phony different and I missed it. Or you might say chat.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
That would be me. The wrong language.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Exactly. You would switch into a different language. Elgato.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Could it be a combination of two? Yeah. Half the word comes out in French and.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah,
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
In Spanish, or something.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
I think it could. I think you'd have to be really fluent for that. But that would be beautiful. Yeah. So I've. I've done the blend before, which is a role you can do. You can follow. I've said platern. I think that was the first feature that I really paid attention to because I was trying to say Planet and Saturn and I said platern.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So all of this is happening obviously really quickly, though. I mean, we try to , when you explain it, you break it down a lot for us. But I mean, it's one thing to say something and saying it happens almost at the same time, doesn't it?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Right. And as you're saying, that whole sentence, that complicated sentence, you're planning part of it and then you plan the rest of it as you go. And that's what I did here and am doing. So language is something that's ongoing. It's something that's happening very fast, which is why it's so hard to study speech errors and language production errors because you're doing it at such a speed and because there's so many factors that can happen. But, you know, generally, we're actually pretty good at it.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yes. I mean, speech errors, are they really common or how how common are they?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
I mean, they're in common in that we are more likely to be correct in the way we speak.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Which is a good thing. We are happy about that.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Thank goodness. There are days, though, and that's actually the point, is that when you're stressed, when you're tired, these speech errors come through a lot more. So, especially if you're frazzled. Think about if you're calling someone by the wrong name. So I call one child by the other name most of the time because you've got multiple small children around there trying to get your attention.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And you're probably doing a million other things at the same time.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Exactly. Your attention is diverted and you're probably activating multiple concepts. I've called my eldest child by the cat's name because they're similar sounds. So. So lots of things happen.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So how do you study that in the lab, then?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Oh, it's complicated. We have to confuse people. My most successful generation of speech errors is when we have people switching back and forth between languages. So in my research, it's about people who have fluency in multiple languages. So I'm usually trying to confuse them, to try to throw them off their access a little bit just to see what the default path is. So with my research, it's a lot of your native English Speaker Right. And then I, I know that you have studied French before and now I'm teaching you Spanish, so I'm having you switch between English and your new language, Spanish. But I'm hoping that French is going to come through. So it's a lot about switching between the different languages and if words are more related to that second language. So if the new language is related to what you already know, then you're more likely to switch because your brain is just trying to find those patterns and trying to get through as quickly as possible.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So is there an example you could give us of a word that's kind of similar maybe in French and Spanish that people will could potentially make an error with?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
I would say what's a good, so cognates are a good example. Yeah. So cognates are words that are related to each other either there sound and they're meaning would be related. Let's see. Trying to think of a good one now.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Sol and Soleil.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah, you can probably do that because it's both of them means sun. For those of our listeners who might then speak both of those languages.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Sol and Soleil, sol is to Spanish for sun for Sol is for French.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Or book. Although it's not a cognate with English between French and Spanish, libro and livre.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So are the other languages that have more cognates, basically.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yes. Yeah. Languages that have more. Also one. The study that I'm doing right now is I'm presenting a determiner. So like L, the word L or la which tells the gender of a term in certain languages. Right. I'm presenting some that have a kind of a cross over the so the same determiner in both languages and some that don't have the same determiner.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
This is so confusing.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
I know it sounds horrible and my apologies to my participants.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So they come to the lab, they don't know what's going to happen, do they?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
They know they're going to be learning a language. They know they're going to be learning words from a new language. And they know that they either should have had experience in a certain language or not had experience in a certain language. And that's all they know.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah. So you try and then you try to induce some of these speech errors by playing with the determiner. So la is in Spanish the same as the determiner in French and French for feminine things not the masculine one.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Correct.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Okay. And so people do make some of these mistakes. And then so what do you do? How do you measure their mistakes, basically.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So essentially, I teach them the new words, and then I test them on whether they've learned it really well by doing a comprehension study. So when I teach it to them,I show a picture, I show the word or words underneath it. And then when they're tested, the first time they see a picture and they have to say whether those are the right or wrong words. So it's a comprehension measure there. And then they do a production study. So they see the picture. And I have to say what it, typically it's saying it, but the last study was during COVID, so it was typed. So we'll see how that compares to spoken errors, which I think would be interesting to use typos versus type speech errors and how fast you're trying to go.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So then you would present them say with the picture of the sun, and then they'd have to say the Spanish.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Mm hmm.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
El Sol?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yes. Very good.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Thank you. I had to dig deep for the determiner there, so el sol, but because they already know French.
They might say El Sol, Soleil, the sun, or.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Exactly.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Similar to that.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And that's why I like to study at the phrase level rather than just like a single word, because it tells us about kind of where these errors are occurring. Because when you produce speech, you don't just produce a single word.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
No.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Right. You have more going on, and certain words are more likely to have these unintentional switches.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Okay. And then you look at those errors and what can they tell us?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So they tell us about how we learn language and how we process language. So if you are only learning the determiners or you're only learning learning the noun, so let's say you're just learning the word sol and you didn't even bother with determiner. Maybe that tells us that you are relying on your previous language learning experience for the determiner level because you're encoding it onto your idea of what a sun is and whether it's masculine or feminine. And maybe that takes longer to update. So this tells us more about multilingual speakers, and it tells us more about people who have lower levels of proficiency in their multiple languages, which is something that isn't really well studied in the field. So with science, I think we're all kind of control freaks. We want to constrain as much as possible so that we can say this is probably due to this, right? But it's very difficult to do that and to build that situation up when people speak multiple languages. So as a field,we've started with fully fluent, fully balanced bilinguals who are in bilingual environments, and we've learned more about that. And that was only after so much research in monolingual English speakers. So this tries to understand a little bit more about people who are multilingual speakers who may or may not have different levels of proficiency, and how that different proficiency might play a role in learning subsequent languages.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And how one, your knowledge in one language impacts the acquisition of another language and how things all get muddled up in your brain and how things are stored. I guess.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Essentially. Yeah.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah. Really interesting. Thanks for talking to us about speech errors.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Of course I'm happy to.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
This is something I really always hate. And you know, through my life as a language learner, I've always hated mistakes, making speech errors. I totally hate it because I always feel embarrassed about it. What's your take on that?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
I love speech errors. I really do love them. I revel in them. I think that speech errors tell you a lot about what should have happened rather than like, Oh, cool, everything worked out. It's a lot like a maths problem in my opinion. It tells you about what you know at that situation. It tells you what was happening in the factory of your mind, as it were, in producing this information and making sense of your mind that when you get it right, it's just kind of like a gold star and you're like, Great. That was fantastic. But it didn't tell us anything. It just showed us what happens when everything goes right.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah. So we should all enjoy our speech errors, basically.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yes, absolutely. In fact, when I lecture, I'm always really excited when I make a speech error and I always have to pause for a moment like, oh, that was a really good one and this is why.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Okay, well, so people should stop feeling embarrassed when they say the wrong word or and just maybe take a moment to think about why they said something else instead and how that tells us about how things are linked in our minds and.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yes, okay. Yeah. Feel good about it.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Feel good about your speech.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
You are processing a lot of information.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
True, true. And give yourself a bit of credit, you know.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Eexactly.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
You know your multiple languages when you make those. Absolutely. But also sometimes, as you mentioned, we can make speech errors in our native language.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yes. All the time.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I wanted to ask. You know, to finish this podcast, do you have three tips? Three things, you know, three things you'd like people to remember about speech errors?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Three things. Okay. The first thing is, everybody makes speech errors. Everybody does. When you're learning. When you're not learning. I'm a fully fluent English native speaker and I make speech errors probably at least once a day. So that's the first thing. Everybody makes speech errors. The second is that making a speech error in you're second or third language is still fantastic. So even if you're trying to say the word foot and you said hand in your second language, I mean, it shows that you have the connection that your brain has, the two things associated. It just misfired. What's the third thing? The the ways different languages interact together is messy and it's complicated, but that's a good thing. So when you're learning a new language and you're making errors, don't feel bad about it. I guess these are all the same theme, like errors. Speech errors are great, but that speech production is really difficult to kind of get started as you start learning a new language. So I know for me I feel like I have to be perfect before I can speak at all.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I think a lot of people feel this way.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah, and that's really just not something that is helpful. It's better to just kind of go for broke and make the speech errors and learn from them rather than assume it has to be perfect. Because if you were going to just not make any errors, you would you wouldn't even speak your native language.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
No, absolutely. And, you know, to become perfectly fluent in another language is actually almost pretty much impossible. Yeah, I think so. Thank you for taking the time to listen and learn about speech errors with the language scientists.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
In our next episode, the last one for the series, I'll be interviewing Dr. Anue Kukona from the University of Greenwich about using online research methods for language learning.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I just want to remind you to take 5 minutes to go in our shownotes and click on the link for our survey. The survey will tell us what you liked about the series and what you'd like to hear about next. Thank you for listening and thank you to the British Academy for funding our podcast.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
I'm Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And I'm Dr Marie-Josee Bisson. And you've been listening to the Language Scientist podcast.
