From the point of view presented in this paper, colours which have a greater
propensity to be involved in a colour name strategy are more likely to coincide
with the colour of a car involved in an accident. To put this another way: people
who drive a car of a well-defined colour, are more likely to be involved in an
accident. There have also been studies into the connection between personality
type and car colour, Marston (1997) [28].
6 Implications for Psycholinguistics
6.1 The Interaction Model
There is evidence that the reception of speech is interactive, three examples of
this are: 1) McGurk and McDonald’s (1976) [30] demonstration that there is
evidence that seeing the speaker speak influences the word heard, 2) McNeil’s
(1985) [31] demonstration that there is evidence that verbal speech production
interacts with gesture, 3) Jacobson’s (1932) [21] p.692 demonstration that var-
ious other physiological activities interact. These observations suggests that
the verbal part of speech production is interactive. A model which allows both
phonological and semantic influences to interact is the Stemberger (1985) [44]
psycholinguistic interaction speech production model. In this model, when the
word feather is activated a lot of other words are also activated with varying
weights according to how closely they resemble feather. This can be described
by the diagram in Stemberger (1985) [44] p.148 and text:
”Semantic and phonological effects on lexical access.... an arrow
denotes an activating link, while a filled circle is an inhibitory link. A
double line represents a large amount of activation, a single solid line
somewhat less, and a broken line even less. Some of the inhibitory
links have been left out... for clarity. The exact nature of semantic
representation is irrelevant here, beyond the assumption that it is
composed of features; . . . a word in quotation marks represents its
meaning.”
There is suppression (also called inhibition) across a level, and activation up
or down to the next level. This model accounts for syntax by giving different
weights to the different words so that words on the left come first. Speech errors
come from the noise in the system. There are three kinds of noise. The first is
that the resting level of a unit node is subject to random fluctuations; with the
result that it is not the case that the unit nodes degree of activation remains at
the base line level. A fluctuation could produce a random production of a part
of a word. The second is that words that are used with a high frequency have
a higher resting level, and therefore reach activation threshold, or ”pop out”,
quicker. This implies that there should be less error for these high frequency
words; furthermore it implies that when real words occur as an error, higher
frequency words should occur as errors more often, and this does not happen.
The third is the so-called systematic spread of activation; this means that the
weights in the interaction allow an inappropriate activation of word.
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