Why is it fairly easy, out of context, to mistake the spoken sentence "The sky is falling" for the sentence "This guy is falling"?
A) They contain the same morphemes, but in different orders.
B) They contain ambiguous or vague referents.
C) The speech stream rarely contains silences between words.
D) There are only about 40 phonemes used in English, not enough to distinguish between sentences that sound the same.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The speech stream often lacks clear silences between words, making it easy to confuse similar-sounding phrases like "The sky is falling" and "This guy is falling" due to the blending of sounds.

Why Is It Fairly Easy, Out of Context, to Mistake