Acoustic Confusion

Acoustic confusion is the effect caused when a person's verbal memory mishears or misremembers a word and then only recalls the similar sounding substituted word in their verbal recall. Most of us had the experience of hearing a song on the radio or television and mishearing some of the lyrics so that when recalled those lyrics make no sense. An example would be thinking the lyrics to "Stairway to Heaven" were actually saying "Airway to Heaven."