Receptive and Expressive Errors

 Students often demonstrate accurate processing (hearing) of a word but make phonological errors when attempting to

  reproduce that word. Five types of phonological errors occur in processing, speaking, or decoding. 

Types of Phonological Errors

Receptive (Processing) Errors

With processing or receptive errors, students mishear a word in spite of having normal hearing in pure tone testing. As the contextual examples below illustrate, an error of just one phoneme in a word can cause a major change in meaning. In many cases, students “hear” – or at least opt for –  a more familiar word.

                  Teacher: Use “lunge” in a sentence.

                  Student: The students lunged around all afternoon.

This student probably uses “lounge” and “lunge” interchangeably without detecting the difference in the single vowel sound.

                  Teacher: Describe a “bare head”.

                  Student: (Gestures and laughs.) Nothing up there between the ears.

                  Teacher: Use “coax” in a sentence.

                  Student: He put several coats of paint on the wall.

                  Teacher: Did you drive through Pennsylvania on your trip?

                  Student: Oh, no! I would never want to go to Pennsylvania.

In the third example above, the teacher learned that the student was thinking of Transylvania, with which he was probably familiar from stories about Dracula. 

                  Student: Are you going to watch the college football playoffs? Most people think

                                  the Nebraska Corn Huskies are dogs, but they’re not! They’re really

                                  football players! (The student meant “Huskers.”)

                  Student: My mom plants bullets in the spring. (The student meant “bulbs”.)

                  Teacher: (Giving a vocabulary pretest in a literature class.) Define “rebel”.

                  Student: Rebel: a little stone in a driveway or park.

                  Teacher: (Discussing harbor seals in a science class.)

                  Student: Harvard seals. All I hear about is Harvard. Does Harvard have to have

                                   its name on everything around here?

Examples of Receptive Errors

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Expressive (Production/Word Retrieval) Errors

The table below provides examples of expressive errors in context and classifies them according to type. The last three examples in the table include a semantic component as well. Specifically, one student associated “Barnes” with “barns” to produce “stable” instead of “Noble”. Another student incorrectly chose “navigator” as a synonym for  “narrator”. In the last

               example, the student’s error involves place.

Examples of Expressive Errors in Context

Word Level Examples of Expressive Errors

Frequently, a student with word retrieval deficits appears to retrieve from neighboring words in phonological storage before producing the target word. For example, one student who was asked to label a scroll produced “scrab-scroble-scroll.” This student had studied Egypt and, in producing “scrab,” was probably combining “scarab” with the familiar “scab.” In producing “scroble,” he retained the scr- cluster, knew an l belonged in the word, and probably made a linkage to the board game “Scrabble.” Only then did this student produce the correct word, “scroll.”

   Helping Students Say What They Mean and Mean What They Say: Thinking About Language          
   A Landmark School Teaching Resource by Roberta Stacey
   © 2003 Landmark School, Inc. and Roberta Stacey

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