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Spoonerisms, the type of verbal slip in which speech sounds are transposed, were subjected in this study to descriptive linguistic analysis. The immediate purpose was to specify the optimal conditions for spoonerism slips in order to facilitate an eventual understanding of the encoding process responsible for this psycholinguistic phenomenon. A total of 201 spoonerism slips was analyzed in terms of eight linguistic variables. The results demonstrated significant tendencies for spoonerisms to conform to several linguistic conditions, thus permitting inferences as to the optimal conditions for these slips, and providing potential hypotheses for determining the cognitive processes responsible for these psycholinguistic accidents.
Michael T. Motley (Thu,) studied this question.