A corpus study of lexical speech errors in Mandarin

Abstract

We investigate a corpus of lexical substitution speech errors in Mandarin conversation data and present how Mandarin speakers produce erroneous lexical items and how these items are related to the intended words. The corpus includes 747 lexical speech errors from 100 participants and applies the part-of-speech definition of the Academia Sinica Corpus. Our results partially match with the observations in Germanic and Romance languages. As an example, the data from Mandarin native speakers shows that erroneously produced words and target words are almost always found in the same parts of speech. Moreover, noun substitutions are the most common type of substitution within the majority of content word pairs. However, the occurrence of verb errors is higher in Mandarin than in other languages, possibly reflecting a word frequency effect.

本研究主要利用747筆華語語意語誤資料，以中研院詞性分類作為機器訓練之模型基底，並搭配其他具有語意語誤之國際語料庫做一比較，結果發現語言產製中仍出現些許世界通用法則。華語在詞性分類表現與其他外語呈現相同現象，尤其是在實詞中，名詞代換的語意語誤佔絕大多數，然而，華語中的語意語誤中，動詞代換明顯比其他外語高出許多，似乎顯現出詞頻效應。