The network notion (also called connectionism) is the idea that knowledge consists of

nothing but a network of atomic nodes standing for concepts whose properties are
defined solely by the node’s connections to other nodes. • The network includes the
taxonomies which enrich exemplars by linking them to increasingly general concepts,
so exemplars inherit properties in the form of a copy of the relevant link (for a simple
property) or the cluster of converging links (for a complex property).

A particularly important kind of error has been called ENVIRONMENTAL

CONTAMINATION (Harley 2006). This is what you find when the choice of words is
influenced by something in the immediate environment that has nothing to do with the
meaning of the current sentence; (3) is an example. (3) Get out of the clark!

Apparently, the person who said (3) meant to say Get out of the car, but was distracted
by a shop sign saying Clark’s. Examples like this are extremely problematic for any
modular theory of speaking in which the processing is all internal to language. In
contrast, examples like (3) are exactly what we expect in a language network which is
embedded in the total cognitive network. In this model, at the point where the
pronunciation of car was being planned, the word clark was also highly active, and
presumably more so than the target car.

8.2.3 Explaining speech errors nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn Although

some of these errors are named after eccentric individuals in the past, you don’t have to
be eccentric to make speech errors. We all make mistakes, and probably more often than
we think – according to one estimate, about once or twice per 1,000 words (Pinker
1998b: 40). Speech errors, therefore, confirm the picture that emerges from priming
experiments, of a highly active network in which activation spreads in a dangerously
random way from each node to all its neighbours (4.2). The network notion, then,
explains why we sometimes say one word while aiming at a different one. The
interference comes from a word which is even more active than the target for one of
three reasons: • because it’s already planned as part of the same utterance (e.g. tasted for
wasted); • because it’s one of the target word’s neighbours in the network (e.g.
preposition for proposition); • because it’s simply prominent in the environment at the
moment of speaking (e.g. clark for car). In each of these cases, of course, the
interference is actually more complicated, just as you would expect in a complex
network. In the tasted–wasted case, it’s no coincidence that when term interferes with
wasted to produce tasted, the result involves a form that actually exists: {taste}, which
may already have some activation. n. And in the clark–car example, both car and
Clark’s start with the sound /k/.
All these extra links help to raise the activation on the interfering word, much as we
would expect given the way in which activation flows round the network.

211-12 The general point is very simple: the network of language provides a map on
which we can trace many different kinds of route. Any general theory of language use
requires sufficient flexibility to accommodate all uses, so it can’t consist of a small
number of pre-defined ‘mechanisms’ for standard activities such as speaking and
writing. Word Grammar achieves this degree of flexibility by allowing activity to be
directed into different routes according to where our current interest locates activation.
The way we use our language also varies according to our current interest. This
distinguishes the four main modalities of language use: speaking, listening, writing and
reading; but it also allows a large number of other uses which can’t be accommodated in
a theory that includes a separate ‘mechanism’ for each modality: singing, reading aloud,
passing grammaticality judgements and so on.

241 A network analysis is exactly what’s needed for teasing out the details, especially
since it allows us to consider just the immediate neighbours of each link.