A Study of Spoonerism in Speech of 4-6 Years Old Persian Language Children: A Psycholinguistic Perspective

Spoonerism is a particular type of unintentional slippage. In other words, Spoonerisms are defined as involuntary reversals in the serial order of speech as in [1] and [2].
sons of toil → tons of soil                                                                                                       (1)
pus pocket→ pos pucket                                                                                                          (2)
Curiously enough the Spoonerism is named after a man who rarely made Spoonerisms as dictionaries define them. William Archibald Spooner (22 July 1844 – 29 August 1930) was a long-serving Oxford don, notable for absent-mindedness, and supposedly liable to mix up the syllables in a spoken phrase, with unintentionally comic effect. Such phrases became known as Spoonerisms, and are often used humorously. Many Spoonerisms have been invented and attributed to Spooner. The aim of current study is to analyze the structure of produced spoonerism by children in the natural speech of Persian language in order to determine the ruling regularity of such slippage in predicting the performance of the child's mental system through its production process. Research method is descriptive - analytic. Samples consist of 33 cases of spoonerism which were gathered by available non-random sampling of common speech of 4-6 years Old Persian language children from 4 kindergartens in Tehran. It’s worth noting that the language status of all children who produced spoonerism were evaluated by Newsha Developmental Scale and just the Spoonerisms were evaluated in which the child had normal language growth. As a result, 33 samples of all 40 collected Spoonerisms were investigated. Binomial test was used to examine the data. The results show that the initial syllable in speech of children is more vulnerable. Also error percentage of sound planning in brain of Persian language children is higher than error percentage in word planning.