Verbal Fluency and the Unintended Pun

After reading Dr. Motley's article, which I discussed last post, I started to wonder if people with high Verbal Fluency would be especially prone to both saying and noticing Untintended Puns. People with high Verbal Fluency basically have lots of connections in their brain to words that are related in different ways--perhaps saying they are good at Word Association, which I will discuss in a future post, would be another way to say it.

I started wondering this because as with much research, the results are aggregated and then reported, disregarding the subjects' native ability. But it seems to me that different people would have different results, based on how their brains are organized. The best that Dr. Motley's research could show, unless the subjects were first tested on Verbal Fluency and other measures, would be the "average" person's response to the stimuli. Someone with low Verbal Fluency would perhaps respond with more mundane word responses; someone with higher Verbal Fluency might range farther through their web of word associations and answer with a more interesting word. See below for an extract from Dr. Motley's article.

Perhaps an experiment could be constructed that would normalize the results, such that the different levels of Verbal Fluency would be taken into account, allowing the basic human tendency of verbal slips and double entendres to be revealed. I guess the experiment might yield very similar results, since the largest part of the bell curve would predominate.


That's where this blog comes in--we need more contributed puns and stories so we can figure out how these things work!

Click here for a Wikipedia article that describes Verbal Fluency.

Here are references to Dr. Motley's two articles:

• 1985 Motley, M.T. Slips of the tongue. Scientific American. 253:116-126.
• 1987 Motley, M.T. What I meant to say. Psychology Today 21(2):24-28.

From the 1987 article:

“a person’s lexicon, or mental dictionary, is organized so that each word in it is interconnected with other words associated by meaning, sound or grammar—somewhat like the interconnection of point in a complex spider web. When we prepare to speak, the relevant parts of the web are activated, causing reverberation within the system. Activation spreads first to the most closely related words, then to words associated with them, and so on. Each word activates an alternate part through the web. The cumulative activation for each word is tallied by checking how often each ‘point’ in the web ‘vibrates,’ and the word with the highest accumulation activation (the most vibration, in our web analogy) is selected. Verbal slips would be explained as the result of competing choices that have equal or nearly equal activation levels.”

Today's Unintended Pun:

August 14, 1992
A roofer and I were discussing the less than first class work that a previous roofer had done, which led to incorrect drainage: “That's water over the dam.”