Published Tuesday January 27, 2009
Cleveland Evans: What's your name again?
One day Griffin got a frantic e-mail from a desperate young man. During an intimate moment, he'd called his new love by his former girlfriend's name. He wanted Griffin to convince the woman this slip didn't mean he was still in love with his ex.
Griffin was surprised when she couldn't find any published research specifically on the issue of people calling loved ones by the wrong name.
However, when she mentioned this to others, she heard many stories about parents calling people by their siblings' names - or even the name of the family pet.
Inspired by these tales, Griffin surveyed more than 330 people about whether their parents ever called them by someone else's name. She found that such errors are common and that they occur most often in certain situations.
For example, parents are more likely to confuse the names of two kids of the same sex than they are to call a brother by a sister's name or vice versa.
People also are more likely to be called by a sibling's name the closer the two are in age. The more people reported they looked like a sibling, the more they often they said their parents confused their names. Those findings are particularly interesting because, to be scrupulously fair, Griffin refused to include any twins in her study.
Similarity in the sound of names was also a big factor. When two names start with the same sound (as in Jason and Jenny), or have the same number of syllables, mistakes happen more often.
Lastly, Griffin found that younger kids were more likely to be called by an older sibling's name than vice versa. That factor operated in her own family; though she doesn't remember her parents ever calling her the wrong name, she remembers several times when they called her younger sister "Zenzi."
Any similarity between two people in the speaker's mind can lead to these mistakes. When Griffin was taking a class from a linguistics professor back in her student days, that professor sometimes called her "Franklin." Zenzi Griffin is an African-American woman and Franklin was a Chinese-American man, but they were the only two psychology majors in a class in which all other students majored in linguistics. That was enough for that professor to confuse their names.
Like Zenzi Griffin, I'm a firstborn and don't remember my parents ever calling me by my sister's name. However, one of my colleagues at Bellevue University is a sociologist named Clem Klaphake and other professors often call me "Clem" instead of "Cleve."
Griffin's research shows you don't need any deep Freudian analysis to understand these mistakes. If you often get called by your sister's name, it doesn't mean Mom loves her best. It just means Mom makes the same sort of speech errors most people do.
cleveland.evans@bellevue.edu
sumber: http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1219&u_sid=10548215
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