Spoonerisms of children.

Abstract The study compared Spoonerisms (phoneme reversals) in the natural speech of children (age 3–6) and adults (over age 22). All of the factors studied influenced the Spoonerisms of adults and children in the same way, relative to chance expectation. However, some factors played a bigger role in child than adult Spoonerisms and the reverse was true for other factors. Thus the differences between children and adults were quantitative rather than qualitative. Moreover these quantitative differences appeared to reflect the child's lack of skill in integrating successive acts in the speech sequence.