Speech Errors and Slips of the Tongue

Speech errors are systematic deviations from intended speech that serve as a primary source of evidence about how utterances are planned.

Definition

Unintended deviations in spoken output, analyzed to infer the representations and processing stages of the language-production system.

Scope

This topic covers the taxonomy of speech errors (exchanges, anticipations, perseverations, substitutions, blends), the regularities they obey, and what those regularities reveal about the units and stages of production planning. It describes the use of error data to constrain production models.

Core questions

• What types of speech errors occur, and what regularities do they obey?
• What planning units do errors implicate (features, phonemes, morphemes, words)?
• How do error patterns distinguish serial from interactive production models?

Key concepts

• exchange error
• anticipation and perseveration
• blend
• lexical bias effect
• the phonemic similarity effect

Key theories

Errors reveal planning units

Fromkin's argument that slips are rule-governed and respect linguistic units and constraints, so they expose the building blocks of production.

Functional and positional levels

Garrett's account that word and sound errors arise at different planning levels, with word exchanges spanning clauses and sound exchanges remaining local.

Interactive activation and error patterns

Dell's model in which feedback between levels predicts mixed errors and the lexical bias effect, where slips tend to form real words.

History

Fromkin's 1971 analysis established the systematic study of slips; Garrett used error distributions to motivate distinct planning levels, and Dell's 1986 model showed how an interactive system reproduces the observed error patterns.

Debates

What lexical bias implies for architecture

Whether the tendency for sound errors to form real words requires feedback between phonological and lexical levels (interactive) or can arise from monitoring in a feedforward system.

Key figures

• Victoria Fromkin
• Merrill Garrett
• Gary Dell

Seminal works

• fromkin1971
• garrett1975
• dell1986

Frequently asked questions

What is a spoonerism?

It is a sound-exchange error in which initial sounds of two words swap, as in 'queer old dean' for 'dear old queen', illustrating that phonological segments are independent planning units.