earticle

영어

This paper examines whether speech errors in Korean are capable of reflecting the age and gender differences of their producers. Following the classification system used for English SOTs, this study collected a total of 207 Korean SOTs and classified them in three different ways. Errors were first grouped according to the speakers' gender and age, and then they were looked at with relation to the stage at which the errors occurred, the form of the errors, as well as the directionality of the errors. According to the data, lexical errors were found to be far more frequent than the other error types. Several differences, though none extremely large, were observed in the SOT errors among participants of different ages as well as between male and female participants. Although the amount of data collected is not large enough to draw any definitive conclusions, these preliminary findings suggest that a difference in language usage by males and females does exist.