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Speech Errors: Psycholinguistic Approach

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DOI: 10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/00797-5

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Harley, T. (2006). Speech errors: Psycholinguistic approach. Invited entry in K. Brown (Ed.), The
Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd. Ed., Vol. 11: pp. 739-744), Oxford: Elsevier.

1.

Speech errors: A psycholinguistic approach (MS 797)

2.

Professor Trevor A. Harley

Department of Psychology

University of Dundee

Dundee

DD1 4HN UK

3.

Natural speech is full of mismatches between intention and output. Slips of the tongue are

errors involving the sounds or words of the language, and provide a window onto the

processes of speech production. Errors can be classified according to the units of speech

(e.g. phoneme, word or phrase) and the mechanisms (e.g. exchange, substitution,

anticipation or perseveration) involved. Analysis of speech errors shows that production

1
occurs takes place in stages, with content words and function words being accessed at

different stages, with some interaction between levels of processing.

4.

Main body (2000 words; is slightly more because I also cover TOTs)

Introduction. Natural speech is far from perfect: it is replete with filled and

unfilled hesitations and errors. A speech error is a mismatch between what we intend to

say and what we actually say. This entry focuses upon a mismatch involving the sounds

of the language, or slips of the tongue, and will not cover hesitations. Speech errors made

by non-brain damaged speakers resemble the errors made by speakers with brain damage,

and the study of both sorts of errors has revealed a great deal about how humans produce

language, and about the relation between language and the brain. This entry will focus on

the speech of non-brain-damaged speakers.

Classification of speech errors. Speech errors can be classified according to the

units of processing and types of mechanism involved.

The units involved in slips of the tongue range from phrases, words (e.g. saying

“pass the pepper” instead of “pass the salt”), morphemes, phonemes (e.g. saying “flock of

2
bats” instead of “block of flats”), to features (e.g. saying “turn the knop” instead of

“knob”). Mechanisms include anticipations (e.g. saying “the mirst of May” instead of

“the first”), perseverations (e.g. saying “God rest re merry gentleman” instead of “God

rest ye”), exchanges (e.g. “Guess whose mind came to name?” instead of “name came to

mind”), substitutions (“Get me a fork” instead of knife), and blends (saying “chung” for

“children” and “young”).

Two particular types of speech error deserve special mention. Spoonerisms are

errors where the initial consonants of words have exchanged. They are named after the

Reverend Dr William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), Warden of New College, Oxford,

who was particularly prone to making this type of error (and indeed, who may have

suffered from a developmental language disorder). Some examples of alleged errors

made by Dr Spooner are:

1. You have wasted the whole term -> You have tasted the whole worm.

2. The Lord is a loving shepherd to his flock -> The Lord is a shoving leopard to

his flock.

Note that in both of these examples the error strings produced form words; these

errors are therefore possible instances of the lexical bias effect described below.

Malapropisms are named after Mrs Malaprop, a character in Sheridan’s play “The

Rivals”. Mrs Malaprop often used grand words incorrectly, such as saying “epitaphs” for

3
“epithets” and “reprehend” for “apprehend”. Following Fay and Cutler (1977), the term

has been used for all phonological word substitutions that inadvertently arise from

processing difficulty, rather than ignorance, such as:

3. Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsody -> Liszt’s Hungarian restaurant

Methodology of speech error collection. There are two main techniques for

collecting speech errors. The first technique involves recorders simply noting speech

errors that they hear in everyday life. This methodology has two advantages. First, it is

naturalistic. Second, it enables a comprehensive corpus of all types of error to be built up.

The disadvantage of this technique it is that is prone to bias. Observers may be more

likely to observe certain types of error (e.g. sound-level errors might be less noticeable

than word-level errors), and they may also be less likely to remember and record certain

types of error.

The second method of collecting errors, laboratory-based induction, involves

participants being required to name pairs of words as rapidly as possible. The participant

makes an error on a small proportion of errors (e.g. reading BARN DOOR as “darn

bore”). The advantages of this methodology is that it is easy to collect a relatively large

number of errors of the sort the experimenter is interested in (here spoonerisms), and that

it is possible to have some element of control over the errors made. The disadvantages are

4
that the technique is more intrusive, the errors involve some element of reading, and the

types of errors that can be observed are restricted.

Fortunately the evidence provided by these methods is convergent. Analysis of

recorded speech suggests that observer bias effects are not large, although they obviously

remain a concern.

Interpretation of speech errors. Speech production comprises conceptualization,

formulation, and encoding (Levelt, 1989). Conceptualization involves determining what

to say – we form the message. Formulation involves translating the message into a

linguistic form, and has two aspects: syntactic planning and lexicalisation (the process

whereby word concepts are turned into sounds). Finally, execution involves detailed

phonetic and articulatory planning. Speech errors have informed our understanding of all

of these stages.

It is important to note that the occurrence of slips of the tongue is not random. In

particular, some sorts of errors that could occur do not (e.g. we do not observe function

words exchanging with content words). This order is the basis for explaining how and

why errors arise in terms of a model of speech production. The basic idea is that for an

error to occur, the two elements of the error (intended and actual outcome) must be

simultaneously active at the same level of processing. For example, words exchange with

words, but content words only exchange with other content words, and function words

with other function words; content words do not exchange with function words, or vice

5
versa. This finding is extraordinarily robust: in my corpus of several thousand speech

errors, there is not a single instance of a content word exchanging with a function word.

This observation supports the idea that content and function words are from

computationally distinct vocabularies that are accessed at different levels of processing.

There are also very different constraints on word and sound exchange errors.

Sounds only exchange across small distances, whereas words can exchange across

phrases; words that exchange tend to come from the same syntactic class, whereas sound

exchange errors are not constrained in this way, but instead swap with words regardless

of their syntactic class.

Syntactic planning. The extension of this type of argument led to the development

of the standard, or the Fromkin-Garrett, model of speech production. Consider the

following famous example from Fromkin (1971/1973).

4. a weekend for MANIACs -> a maniac for WEEKENDs

The capital letters indicate the primary sentence stress and the italics secondary

stress. The error left the stress unchanged, suggesting that stress is generated

independently of the particular words involved. Note also that the plural morpheme “-s”

remained where it was originally intended to be: it did not move with “maniac”, but

instead was stranded. Furthermore, the plural morpheme was realized as /z/ not /s/, so

6
that the plural ending sounds consistent with the word that actually came before it, not

with the word that was originally intended to come before it. This error is an example of

accommodation to the phonological environment.

In Garrett’s model there are two major stages of syntactic planning. At the earlier

functional level, word order is not explicitly represented. The semantic content of words

is specified and assigned to roles such as subject and object. At the positional level,

words are explicitly ordered. There is a dissociation between syntactic planning and

lexical retrieval. There is a further dissociation within lexical retrieval: Garrett argued

that content and function words play very different roles in language production, with

content words selected at the functional level, whereas function words are not selected

until the positional level.

In this model, word exchanges occur at the functional level. As only the functional

roles of the words and not their absolute positions are specified at this level, word

exchanges are constrained by syntactic category but not by the distance between the

exchanging words. Next we generate a syntactic frame for the planned sentence. The

phonological representations of content words are then accessed from the lexicon using

the semantic representation. Content words are then inserted into the syntactic planning

frame where final positions are specified to form the positional level. The function words

and other grammatical elements are then phonologically specified to give the sound-level

representation. Sound exchanges occur at this stage and, as their absolute position is now

specified, such errors are constrained by distance.

7
 Garrett’s model accounts for a great deal of the speech error evidence, but a number

of subsequent observations suggested that some aspects of it might not be correct. First, it

is not at all clear that speech production is strictly serial. There is clearly some evidence

for at least local parallel processing in word blend errors, which must be explained by

two (or more) words being simultaneously retrieved from the lexicon, as in (5). More

problematically, we find blends of phrases and sentences (e.g. 6). Furthermore, the locus

of these blends is determined phonologically, so that the two phrases cross over where

they are most similar in sound, suggesting that the alternative messages are processed in

parallel from the message to the sound levels (Butterworth, 1983).

We also observe cognitive intrusion errors where material extraneous to the

utterance intrudes into it. The message level can intrude into lower levels of processing,

producing non-plan-internal errors (e.g. 7). These errors are often phonologically

facilitated, meaning that errors are more likely to occur if the target word and intrusion

sound alike (Harley, 1984). The names of objects or words in the outside environment

can also intrude into speech, producing environmental contamination errors (e.g. 8). Once

again we find that phonological facilitation of environmental contaminants occurs more

often than one would expect by chance (although to a lesser degree than with other

cognitive intrusions).

5. Utterance: It’s difficult to valify. (Targets: validate + verify)

8
 6. Utterance: I’m making the kettle on. (Target 1: I’m making some tea. + Target 2:

I’m putting the kettle on.)

7. Utterance: I’ve eaten all my library books. (Target: I’ve read all my library

books. Context: The speaker reported that he was hungry and was thinking of

getting something to eat.)

8. Utterance: Get out of the clark. (Target: Get out of the car. Context: The speaker

was looking at a shop-front in the background that had the name “Clark’s”

printed on it; he was not aware of this when he spoke.)

Lexical access. There is a consensus that lexicalization is a two-stage process.

When we produce a word, processing moves from the semantic level to an intermediate

level containing lemmas, which are specified syntactically and semantically. We then

retrieve the phonological forms of these words in a stage of phonological encoding. There

is a great deal of evidence supporting the two-stage hypothesis.

Fay and Cutler (1977) observed that there were two distinct types of whole word

substitution speech error: semantic substitutions, such as (9) and (10), and form-based

substitutions, such as (11) and (12).

9. fingers -> toes

10. husband -> wife

11. equivalent -> equivocal

9
 12. historical -> hysterical

Fay and Cutler argued that the existence of two types of word substitution suggests

that the processes of word production and comprehension use the same lexicon, but in

opposite directions. Items in the lexicon are arranged phonologically for spoken word

recognition, so that words that sound similar are close together. The lexicon is accessed in

production by traversing a semantic network. Semantic errors occur when traversing the

decision tree, and phonological errors occur when the final phonological form is selected.

Although the idea that lexicalisation occurs in two stages appears to be supported by

evidence from other sources such as picture naming, tip-of-the-tongue states, studies of

people with anomia, and brain imaging, there is nevertheless some dissent (Caramazza,

1997; Caramazza & Miozzo, 1997).

Feedback in speech production. Is there reverse information flow when we

choose words? Models based primarily on speech error data see speech production

primarily as an interactive process involving feedback (e.g. Dell, 1986; Dell & Reich,

1981; Harley, 1984; Stemberger, 1985) because speech errors show evidence of multiple

constraints, called familiarity biases and similarity effects.

Familiarity bias is the tendency for errors to produce familiar sequences of

phonemes. In particular, lexical bias is the tendency for sound-level speech errors such as

spoonerisms to result in words rather than nonwords (e.g. “barn door” being produced as

10
“darn bore”) more often than chance would predict. Although we would expect some

sound errors to form words sometimes by chance, Dell and Reich showed that this

happens far more often than is expected by chance. This interaction between lexical and

phonological processes has been shown both for naturally occurring speech errors (Dell,

1986; Dell & Reich, 1981) and in artificially induced spoonerisms (Baars et al., 1975).

Some aphasic speakers show lexical bias in their errors (Blanken, 1998).

Similarity effects arise when the error is more similar to the target than would be

expected by chance. In mixed substitution errors the intrusion is both semantically and

phonologically related to the target (e.g. 13 and 14). We find mixed errors far more often

than would be expected by chance alone (Dell & Reich, 1981; Harley, 1984; Shallice &

McGill, 1978). We also find similar results in artificially induced speech errors (e.g.

Baars et al., 1975; Motley & Baars, 1976) and in errors arising in complex naming tasks

(Martin, Weisberg, & Saffran, 1989).

13. comma – colon

14. calendar –catalogue

Similarity effects are problematical for serial models such as Fay and Cutler’s. The

basic model must be modified in one of two ways. Butterworth (1983) proposed that a

filter or editor checks the output to see that it is plausible; it is less likely to detect an

error if the word output sounds like the target should have been, or is related in meaning.

11
Such a mechanism, although it might be related to comprehension processes, is not

considered to be parsimonious.

There is instead an emerging consensus among speech production theorists that

lexicalization can be described by spreading activation in an interactive activation model.

Dell (1986), Harley (1993), and Stemberger (1985) proposed different versions of the

same basic model.

Dell’s interactive model of speech production. Dell (1986) proposed an

interactive model of lexicalization based on the mechanism of spreading activation. Items

are slotted into frames at each level of processing. Processing units specify the syntactic,

morphological, and phonological properties of words. Activation spreads from the

sentence level, where items are coded for syntactic properties, through a morphological

level, to a phonological level. At each level, the most highly activated item is inserted

into the currently active slot in the frame. The flow of activation throughout the network

is time-dependent, so that the first noun in a sentence is activated before the second noun.

Feedback between the phonological and lexical levels gives rise to lexical bias and

similarity constraints.

The model gives a good account of the origin of word and sound level errors.

Several units may be active at each level of representation at any one time. If there is

sufficient random noise, an item might be substituted for another one. As items are coded

12
for syntactic category and position, the other units that are active at any one time tend to

be similar to the target in these respects.

The tip-of-the-tongue state. The failure to produce at all is the ultimate speech

error. A tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state is a noticeable temporary failure of lexical access,

where the word can take some considerable time to be produced, if it is at all. In a TOT

state, you know you know the word, but cannot access the sounds.

Brown and McNeill (1966) were the first to examine the TOT state experimentally.

They induced TOTs by reading people definitions of low-frequency words:

15. “A navigational instrument used in measuring angular distances, especially the

altitude of the sun, moon, and stars at sea.”

(15) defines “sextant”. Brown and McNeill found that a sizeable proportion of

people are placed in a TOT state by this task. Furthermore, in a TOT, partial information

about the target word, such as the number of syllables, the initial letter or sound, and the

stress pattern, can sometimes be retrieved. People also sometimes produce near

phonological neighbours like “secant”, “sextet”, and “sexton”; these other words that

come to mind are called interlopers.

The tip-of-the-tongue state is readily explained as success of the first stage of

lexicalization but failure of the second stage. In support of this idea, Vigliocco, Antonini,

13
and Garrett (1997) showed that grammatical gender can be preserved in tip-of-the-tongue

states in Italian. That is, even though speakers cannot retrieve the phonological form of a

word, they can retrieve some syntactic information about it. Two theories have been

proposed to explain why the second stage of lexical access fails in TOTs. Brown and

McNeill proposed a partial activation hypothesis, which states that the target items are

inaccessible because they are only weakly represented in the system. Burke, MacKay,

Worthley, and Wade (1991) provided evidence in favour of this model from experimental

and diary studies. They argued that the retrieval deficit involves weak links between the

semantic and phonological systems. The blocking hypothesis, first proposed by

Woodworth (1938), states that the target item is actively suppressed by a stronger

competitor. Jones and Langford (1987) used a variant of the Brown and McNeill task

known as phonological blocking to test this idea. They presented a phonological

neighbour of the target word and showed that the presence of this neighbour increases the

chance of a TOT state occurring, whereas presenting a semantic neighbour does not. They

interpreted this as showing that TOTs primarily arise as a result of competition. However,

the same pattern of results is found with these materials when the blockers are not

presented, suggesting that the original results depended on the precise materials used

(Perfect & Hanley, 1992; Meyer & Bock, 1992).

Harley and Bown (1998) showed that TOTs are more likely to arise on low-

frequency words that have few close phonological neighbours. This finding fits a

partial activation model of the origin of TOTs rather than an interference model. Indeed,

14
phonological neighbours appear to play a supporting rather than a blocking role in lexical

access. So far then the TOT data best support the partial activation hypothesis.

The Freudian slip. Freud argued that slips of the tongue are “a window to the

mind” in that they provide insight into the hidden, repressed desires and opinions of

speakers. In part of a general treatise on action slips, or parapraxes, Freud (1901/1975)

noted the occurrence of slips of the tongue, and proposed that they revealed our repressed

thoughts. In one of his examples, a professor said in a lecture, “In the case of female

genitals, in spite of many Versuchungen (temptations)--I beg your pardon, Versuche

(experiments) …”. Not all Freudian slips need arise from a repressed sexual thought. In

another example he gives, the President of the Lower House of the Austrian Parliament

opened a meeting with “Gentlemen, I take notice that a full quorum of members is

present and herewith declare the sitting closed!” (instead of open). Freud interpreted this

as revealing the President’s true thoughts, which were that he secretly wished a

potentially troublesome meeting closed. Such errors have come to be known as Freudian

slips. Ellis (1980) reanalyzed Freud’s collection of speech errors in terms of a modern

process-oriented account of speech production. The problem with the Freudian

interpretation is that most (if not all) of the examples he provides are more simply

accounted for in terms of the simple cognitive mechanisms described above. There is no

need to invoke complex motivational systems as well. Nevertheless, a small number of

15
true Freudian slips. It is certainly the case that thoughts can intrude into overt speech, as

is shown by the following example (16) from Harley (1984).

16. Utterance: I’ve eaten all my library books. (Target: I’ve read all my library

books. Context: The speaker was hungry and thinking of getting something to eat.)

16
5.

Bibliography (30 books, monographs, reviews)

INSERT

Baars, B. J., Motley, M. T., & MacKay, D. G. (1975). Output editing for lexical

status in artificially elicited slips of the tongue. Journal of Verbal Learning

and Verbal Behavior, 14, 382-391.

Blanken, G. (1998). Lexicalisation in speech production: Evidence from form-

related word substitutions in aphasia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 15,

321-360.

Brown, A. S. (1991). A review of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Psychological

Bulletin, 109, 204-22.

Brown, R., & McNeill, D. (1966). The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon. Journal of

Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5 325-337.

Burke, D. M., MacKay, D. G., Worthley, J. S., & Wade, E. (1991). On the tip of the

tongue: What causes word finding failures in young and old adults? Journal

of Memory and Language. 30. 542-579.

Butterworth, B. (1983). Speech errors: old data in search of new theories. In A.

Cutler (Ed.), Slips of the tongue and language production (pp. 73-108).

Berlin: Mouton.

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Caramazza, A. (1997). How many levels of processing are there in lexical access?

Cognitive Neuropsychology, 14, 177-208.

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phonological knowledge in lexical access: Evidence from the ‘tip-of-the-

tongue’ phenomenon. Cognition, 64, 309-343

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Freud, S. (1975). The psychopathology of everyday life (trans. A. Tyson).

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Fromkin, V. A. (1973). The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances. In V. A.

Fromkin (Ed.), Speech errors as linguistic evidence (pp. 215-269). The

Hague: Mouton. 215-269. (Reprint of Fromkin, V. A. (1971). The non-

anomalous nature of anomalous utterances. Language, 47, 27-52.)

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Garrett, M. F. (1975). The analysis of sentence production. In G. H. Bower (Ed.),

The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 9, pp. 133-177). New York:

Academic Press.

Garrett, M. F. (1976). Syntactic processes in sentence production. In R. J. Wales &

E. Walker (Eds.), New approaches to language mechanisms (pp. 231-255).

Amsterdam: North Holland.

Harley, T. A. (1984). A critique of top-down independent levels models of speech

production: Evidence from non-plan-internal speech production. Cognitive

Science, 8, 191-219.

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access in speech production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8,

291-309.

Harley, T. A. (2001). The psychology of language (2nd. ed.). Hove: Psychology

Press.

Harley, T. A., & Bown, H.. (1998). What causes a tip-of-the-tongue state? Evidence

for lexical neighbourhood effects in speech production. British Journal of

Psychology, 89, 151-174.

Jones, G. V., & Langford, S. (1987). Phonological blocking in the tip-of-the-tongue

state. Cognition, 26, 115-122.

Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA:

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Martin, N., Weisberg, R. W., & Saffran, E. M. (1989). Variables influencing the

occurrence of naming errors: Implications for models of lexical retrieval.

Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 462-485.

Meyer, A. S., & Bock, K. (1992). The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: Blocking or

partial activation? Memory & Cognition, 20, 715-726.

Motley, M. T., & Baars, B. J. (1976). Semantic bias effects on the outcomes of

verbal slips. Cognition, 4, 177-187.

Perfect, T. J., & Hanley, J. R. (1992). The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: Do

experimenter-presented interlopers have any effect? Cognition, 45, 55-75.

Rapp, B. & Goldrick, M. (2000). Discreteness and interactivity in spoken word

production. Psychological Review, 107. 460-499 .

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Attention and performance (pp. 193-208). VII Erlbaum. 193-208.

Stemberger, J. P. (1985). An interactive activation model of language production. In

A. W. Ellis (Ed.), Progress in the psychology of language (Vol. 1, pp.

143-186). London: Erlbaum.

Vigliocco, G., Antonini, T., & Garrett, M. F. (1997). Grammatical gender is on the

tip of Italian tongues. Psychological Science, 8, 314-317.

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6.

Keywords (10-15)

Speech errors, speech production, slips of the tongue, tip-of-the-tongue state,

lexicalisation, word substitutions, feedback, Freudian slip, functional level, positional

level

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7.

Cross-references to other articles

Pauses in speaking

Spoken language production

8.

Artwork and multimedia annex

See figure.

No multimedia annex.

9.

Copyright permissions

None needed.

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10.

Brief biography

Trevor Harley is Professor of Cognitive Psychology and currently Head of the

Psychology Department at the University of Dundee, Scotland, to where he moved in

1996 from the University of Warwick. After an undergraduate degree in psychology, he

carried out his PhD at the University of Cambridge on speech errors, producing a highly

interactive model of speech production where top-down influences play an important role

at all stages. His current research interests include speech errors, connectionist modelling

of speech production, and language pathology, particularly speech and conversational

skills in people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

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!

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Figure 1 Garrett’s model of speech production

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 !

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