Preconscious Influences on Word Substitutions

Abstract

This study set out to investigate the influence of unconscious or irrelevant concerns on the speech we use, under controlled conditions. Eighteen subjects were required to carry out a standard language production task, i.e. to complete a sentence from a carefully chosen set of alternatives. During this task, a word, similar in some respect to one of the alternatives, was either (a) presented outside the subject’s awareness, or (b) presented at a level at which the word could be heard but not identified or (c) not presented at all. These conditions were termed the Sub-Awareness, Sub-Recognition and Control conditions respectively. Results showed that while most sentences were completed with alternatives which honoured sentence constraints, inadequate sentence completions were also chosen. Such choices of anomalous completions were clearly influenced by the sub-threshold stimuli: significantly more inappropriate semantic similars of the sub-threshold word were given in the Sub-Awareness condition than in either of the other two conditions, and significantly more phonological similars were produced in the Sub-Recognition condition.