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27/02/2024

30/01/2024

Psycholinguists who collect and analyze speech errors find many ways to categorize them and to explain how and why people make them.

I like to compare that effort with how Charles Darwin studied Galápagos finches. Studying speech errors and finches in detail reveals how tiny variations distinguish them.

Theories of how people talk seek to explain those details. Psycholinguists distinguish slips by the linguistic units that they involve, such as consonants, vowels, words and phrases. They describe how and when speakers use such information. This can help us understand how language develops in children and how it breaks down in people with certain impairments.

30/01/2024

Another type of word substitution reveals something else about our mental dictionaries. Someone who meant to refer to his mustache said instead, “I got whipped cream on my mushroom.” The words “mustache” and “mushroom” sound similar. Each word starts with the same consonant and vowel, denoted as “[mʌ]” in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Each word is two syllables long with stress on the first syllable. But the meanings of these two words are not similar.

This word substitution – and thousands like it – suggests that our mental dictionaries also link words with similar sounds. In other words, phonological connections can influence speech errors. The speaker here was trying to get the word “mustache” from the “[mʌ]” section of his mental dictionary and slipped over to its phonological neighbor “mushroom.”

30/01/2024

Another way to think about speech errors is in terms of what influences them. Substitutions of one word for another can illustrate.

Someone who meant to refer to fingers said instead, “Don’t burn your toes.” The words “toe” and “finger” don’t sound alike, but they name similar body parts. In fact, Latin used the same word, “digitus,” to refer to digits of the hands and digits of the feet.

This word substitution – and thousands like it – suggests that our mental dictionaries link words with related meanings. In other words, semantic connections can influence speech errors. The speaker here was trying to get the word “finger” from the body-part section of his mental dictionary and slipped over to its semantic neighbor “toe.”