Speech error · Lablypedia

Speech errors are common among children, who have yet to refine their speech, and can frequently continue into adulthood. When errors continue past the age of 9 they are referred to as "residual speech errors" or RSEs. They sometimes lead to embarrassment and betrayal of the speaker's regional or ethnic origins. However, it is also common for them to enter the popular culture as a kind of linguistic "flavoring". Speech errors may be used intentionally for humorous effect, as with spoonerisms.

Within the field of psycholinguistics, speech errors fall under the category of language production. Types of speech errors include: exchange errors, perseveration, anticipation, shift, substitution, blends, additions, and deletions. The study of speech errors has contributed to the establishment/refinement of models of speech production since Victoria Fromkin's pioneering work on this topic.

Psycholinguistic explanations

Speech errors are made on an occasional basis by all speakers. They occur more often when speakers are nervous, tired, anxious or intoxicated. During live broadcasts on television or on the radio, for example, nonprofessional speakers and hosts often make speech errors because they are under stress. Some speakers seem more prone to speech errors than others. For example, there is a certain connection between stuttering and speech errors. Charles F. Hockett explains that "whenever a speaker feels some anxiety about possible lapse, he will be led to focus attention more than normally on what he has just said and on what he is just about to say. These are ideal breeding grounds for stuttering." Another example of a "chronic sufferer" is William Archibald Spooner, whose peculiar speech may be caused by a cerebral dysfunction, but there is much evidence that he invented his famous speech errors (spoonerisms).

An explanation for the occurrence of speech errors comes from psychoanalysis, in the so-called Freudian slip. Sigmund Freud assumed that speech errors are the result of an intrapsychic conflict of concurrent intentions. "Virtually all speech errors [are] caused by the intrusion of repressed ideas from the unconscious into one's conscious speech output", Freud explained. In fact, his hypothesis explains only a minority of speech errors.

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Psycholinguistic classification

There are few speech errors that clearly fall into only one category. The majority of speech errors can be interpreted in different ways and thus fall into more than one category. For this reason, percentage figures for the different kinds of speech errors may be of limited accuracy. Moreover, the study of speech errors gave rise to different terminologies and different ways of classifying speech errors. Here is a collection of the main types:

Speech errors can affect different kinds of segments or linguistic units:

Types

Grammatical – For example, children take time to learn irregular verbs, so in English use the -ed form incorrectly. This is explored by Steven Pinker in his book Words and Rules.
Mispronunciation
Vocabulary – Young children make category approximations, using car for truck for example. This is known as hyponymy.

Examples

"particuly" (particularly) ← elision
"syntaxically" (syntactically) ← vocabulary

Scientific relevance

Speech production is a highly complex and extremely rapid process, and thus research into the involved mental mechanisms proves to be difficult. Investigating the audible output of the speech production system is a way to understand these mental mechanisms. According to Gary S. Dell, "the inner workings of a highly complex system are often revealed by the way in which the system breaks down". Therefore, speech errors are of an explanatory value with regard to the nature of language and language production.

Evidence and insights

Speech errors provide insights into the sequential order of language production processes and the interactivity of language production modules.

Speech errors involve substitutions, shifts, additions and deletions of segments. "In order to move a sound, the speaker must think of it as a separate unit." Obviously, speech errors cannot be accounted for without considering these discrete segments. They constitute the planning units of language production. Among them are distinctive features, phonemes, morphemes, syllables, words and phrases. Victoria Fromkin points out that "many of the segments that change and move in speech errors are precisely those postulated by linguistic theories." Consequently, speech errors give evidence that these units are psychologically real.

It can be inferred from speech errors that speakers adhere to a set of linguistic rules. "There is a complex set of rules which the language user follows when making use of these units." Among them are for example phonetic constraints, which prescribe the possible sequences of sounds. Moreover, the study of speech error confirmed the existence of rules that state how morphemes are to be pronounced or how they should be combined with other morphemes. The following examples show that speech errors also observe these rules:

Target: He likes to have his team rested. [rest+id]

Error: He likes to have his rest teamed. [ti:m+d]

Target: Both kids are sick. [kid+z]

Error: Both sicks are kids. [sik+s]

Here, the past tense morpheme and the plural morpheme are phonologically conditioned, although the lemmas are exchanged. This proves that the lemmas are inserted before phonological conditioning takes place.

Target: Don't yell so loud! / Don't shout so loud!

Error: Don't shell so loud!

"Shout" and "yell" are both appropriate words in this context. Due to the pressure to continue speaking, the speaker has to make a quick decision which word should be selected. This pressure leads to the speaker's attempt to utter the two words simultaneously, which resulted in the creation of a blend. According to Charles F. Hockett, there are six possible blends of "shout" and "yell". The speaker obeyed unconscious linguistic rules because they selected the blend which satisfied the linguistic demands of these rules the best. Illegal non-words are for example instantaneously rejected.

In conclusion, the rules that govern the production of speech must also be part of our mental organization of language.

Errors in speech are non-random. Linguists can elicit from the speech error data how speech errors are produced and which linguistic rules they adhere to. As a result, they are able to predict speech errors.

Lexical errors

The existence of lexical or phonemic exchange errors indicates that speakers typically engage in planning their utterances beforehand. In each case, the whole utterance seems available to them.

Anticipation

Target: Take my bike.

Error: Bake my bike.

Perseveration

Target: He pulled a tantrum.

Error: He pulled a pantrum.

Performance errors

Performance errors may provide empirical evidence for linguistic theories and serve to test hypotheses about language and speech production models. For that reason, the study of speech errors is significant for the construction of performance models and gives insight into language mechanisms.

Performance errors supply evidence for the psychological existence of discrete linguistic units.

Substitution errors

Substitution errors, for instance, reveal parts of the organization and structure of the mental lexicon.

Target: My thesis is too long.

Error: My thesis is too short.

In the case of substitution errors, both segments mostly belong to the same category, which means for example that a noun is substituted for a noun. Lexical selection errors are based on semantic relations such as synonymy, antonymy or membership of the same lexical field. For this reason, the mental lexicon is structured in terms of semantic relationships.

Target: George's wife

Error: George's life

Target: fashion square

Error: passion square

Some substitution errors based on phonological similarities demonstrate that the mental lexicon is also organized in terms of sound.

Generalizations

Four generalizations about speech errors have been identified:

Interacting elements tend to come from a similar linguistic environment, which means that initial, middle, final segments interact with one another.
Elements that interact with one another tend to be phonetically or semantically similar to one another. This means that consonants exchange with consonants and vowels with vowels.
Slips are consistent with the phonological rules of the language.
There are consistent stress patterns in speech errors. Predominantly, both interacting segments receive major or minor stress.

These four generalizations support the idea of the lexical bias effect. This effect states that our phonological speech errors generally form words rather than non-words. Baars (1975) showed evidence for this effect when he presented word pairs in rapid succession and asked participants to say both words in rapid succession back. In most of the trials, the mistakes made still formed actual words.

Information obtained from performance additions

An example of the information that can be obtained is the use of "um" or "uh" in a conversation. These might be meaningful words that tell different things, one of which is to hold a place in the conversation to prevent interruption. There seems to be a hesitant stage and fluent stage that suggest speech has different levels of production. The pauses seem to occur between sentences, conjunctional points and before the first content word in a sentence. That suggests that a large part of speech production happens there.

Schachter et al. (1991) conducted an experiment to examine if the numbers of word choices affect pausing. They sat in on the lectures of 47 undergraduate professors from 10 different departments and calculated the number and times of filled pauses and unfilled pauses. They found significantly more pauses in the humanities departments as opposed to the natural sciences. These findings suggest a correlation between the quantity of word choices and the frequency of pauses, hence the pauses serve to give speakers time to choose their words.

Slips of the tongue can occur at various levels: syntactic, phrasal, lexical-semantic, morphological, and phonological. They can take multiple forms, such as additions, substitutions, deletions, exchanges, anticipations, perseverations, shifts, and haplologies.

There are some biases shown through slips of the tongue. One kind is a lexical bias which shows that the slips people generate are more often actual words than random sound strings. Baars Motley and Mackay (1975) found that it was more common for people to turn two actual words into two other actual words than when they do not create real words.

A second kind is a semantic bias which shows a tendency for sound bias to create words that are semantically related to other words in the linguistic environment. Motley and Baars (1976) found that a word pair like "get one" will more likely slip to "wet gun" if the pair before it is "damp rifle". These results suggest that people are sensitive to how things are laid out semantically.

Euphemistic misspeaking

Since the 1980s, the word misspeaking has been used increasingly in politics to imply that errors made by a speaker are accidental and should not be construed as a deliberate attempt to misrepresent the facts of a case. As such, its usage has attracted a degree of media coverage, particularly from critics who feel that the term is overly approbative in cases where either ignorance of the facts or intent to misrepresent should not be discarded as possibilities.

The word was used by a White House spokesman after George W. Bush seemed to say that his government was always "thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people" (a classic example of a Bushism), and more famously by then American presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who recalled landing in at the US military outpost of Tuzla "under sniper fire" (in fact, video footage demonstrates that there were no such problems on her arrival). Other users of the term include American politician Richard Blumenthal, who incorrectly stated on a number of occasions that he had served in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.