Speech Error - Psycholinguistic Explanations

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 TV or on the radio, for example, nonprofessional speakers and even hosts often make speech errors because they are under stress. Some speakers seem to be 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 Reverend 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An outdated explanation for the occurrence of speech errors is the one of Sigmund Freud, who assumed that speech errors are the result of an intrapsychic conflict of concurrent intentions. “Virtually all speech errors caused by the intrusion of repressed ideas from the unconscious into one’s conscious speech output”, Freud explained. This gave rise to the expression Freudian slip. His theory was rejected because only a minority of speech errors was explainable by his theory.