The pronunciation of words in any language is of interest for many, be it nouns, verbs or any other form of language. Some people pronounce the morphemes in wrong way due to lack of knowledge of phonetics of that language or due to dialect diversification. But there is another practice that people carry unknowingly. And this practice gives joy to others and there are some programmes on TV to check whether people can control themselves on this practice. What actually people do in that? When given a sentence of morphemes with similar sounds, people tend to commit malapropism. But this fault is removed or avoided when they pay thoughtful attention on their pronunciation, or when they accent on every word. But again when fluency is required, they commit the same error.Another case is that when there is a different morpheme with similar sound morphemes, people pronounce that morpheme with the sound as that of similar sound morphemes. This also, like the previous case, does not occur when they do it knowingly or accenting every word. And fluency has its effect here also. Some people call it slips of tongue.
Experiment
I took the name of TV cricket show, which was telecast on ESPN TV during tea-time of the match—”THE SHAZ AND WAZ SHOW”. Two former players Ravi Shastri and Wasim Akram actually host it. And they were called “RAVI SHAZ SHASTRI AND WASIM WAZ AKRAM”When asked from 20 students of under graduate studies of Mechanical engineering, who were aware of this show and had watched it, this is what I founded. Every single body pronounced the last word “Akram” as “Wakram”. When they realized what they did, they pronounced it correctly. But again they committed the same fault when question of fluency came. And some of them faultily pronounced the words “Shaz” and “Waz”, which I have predicted as the first possibility.
Language Factor
This practice has no bounds of language, as this may happen with every language. It has not direct affect of semantics of the morphemes but of sound they produce. I tested other sentences in “Punjabi” and “Hindi” and found the same results.
Conclusion and predictions
From the above discussion, i conclude that there is a short term conditioning of brain, by which similar sounds are pronounced even if the morphemes are different. But the thoughtful attention may stop or control this conditioning. Of course, the fluency of tongue again causes it. The Wernicke’s area of temporl lobes and Broca’s area of the prefrontal cortex may be playing their parts in this conditioning. The probability of this conditioning may increase, if ye ask from the persons, who have not heard those names before or do not watch cricket. The first possibility may also increase due to lack of knowledge of language or morphemes. As the semantics factor may also play its part. The Wernicke’s area of temporal lobes and Broca’s area of prefrontal cortex can be scanned, while people pronounce these morphemes. There may be firing of neurons and the brain may actually recognize same neuron for different morphemes. The added phoneme “w” in the above experiment may be due to just the fast neuron firing and the brain, unable to handle this firing, causes the malapropism.
