The Slips Pages

at Bowling Green State University,
in Bowling Green, Ohio!

Speech Errors, or Slips of the Tongue

There are, to be sure, some persons whose attention is abnormally fixed upon the words rather than upon the topic under discussion, and they sometimes make a nuisance of themselves by pointing out the error and getting it laughed at or recorded before the business at hand is allowed to proceed. One should be kind to these people: they are either fools or linguists. (Sturtevant 1947)

• Featured Error
• Previously Featured Errors
• Slips FAQ
• List of Published References
• All of the Slips made by Sheri Wells-Jensen on the Morning of June 13, 2006
• Problems with Sounds
• Problems with Meaningful Parts of Words
• Problems with Whole Words
• Problems with Whole Sentences
• Advice on Collecting Naturally-Occurring Slips of the Tongue

This page is intended to give you a solid (and hopefully enjoyable) introduction to the fascinating world of slip research. Every day, your speech production system is doing the incredible: allowing you to take a thought, any thought, out of your head and crystalize it into words so that others can understand what you were thinking. And, every day, your speech production system is making mistakes: sometimes small ones that go unnoticed and sometimes horribly embarrassing ones that haunt you for a long, long time. The more you pay attention to them, the more you will hear them.

This main page introduces you to the kinds of speech errors that occur. The FAQ takes a more leisurely and sometimes whimsical look at slips research. The slips on these pages were made or recorded by me, my colleagues or have been rounded up off the internet and various other sources. I've made every attempt to use only real, not created, data so you can see what people really say.

Perhaps the best thing about slips research is this: the data are fun to read and ponder. We hope you enjoy your journey through these pages. Please Email the Meb Waster if:

• you have questions
• or suggestions
• or difficulties with the webpage
• or interesting ideas
• you would like to contribute a slip that you have heard or made for possible world-wide fame as a featured slip
• you think of something else we should mention or link to
• you've never emailed a linguist before and wonder what that might be like!

Jealous? Wish you knew as much Chinese as she knows English? Try Linese.com for a large, if slightly overwhelming set of online audio visual resources or http://mandarin-for-parents.com/ for a very nice set of CDs.

Want to read more about slips made by second language speakers? Try a book called Speech errors in first and second language production by Nanda Poulisse (John Benjamin's 1999)

For more about teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, see www.tesol.org/

Down to Business

We use the term error because what was said really does represent a kind of accident, but linguists don't attach any of the usual negative baggage to the term error. Speech errors aren't 'wrong' or 'bad' or evidence of carelessness or sloppy speech. Even the most careful speaker finds him- or herself surprised by a speech error at intervals. Linguists don't judge people for making speech errors. In fact, we're grateful for them since what happens in an error can teach us so much.

What is a Slip of the Tongue?

Technically, a speech error (or slip) is an unintentional movement, addition, deletion, blending or substitution of material within an utterance or between utterances. (Fromkin 1973, 1980; Stemberger 1983). This means that the speaker says something s/he didn't mean to say. You can often 'feel it' when you've made a slip. It's a sudden realization that what just came out of your mouth was not what you'd been planning to say.

Crucially, the utterance is the result of unintentional processes. A slip is not bad grammar, colorful or idiosyncratic speech, incomplete knowledge of a language, interference from another language or intentional silliness. Speech errors are not caused by lack of information. If you answer a question incorrectly or if you are confused in other ways, what you say is not necessarily a speech error. Stutterers, and people with other speech disorders, may make speech errors, but neither a stutter nor slurred speech are in and of themselves, slips of the tongue. Read more about speech disorders courtesy of The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association .

In the technical sense, none of the following examples count as slips:

• He don't work for City Auto anymore.

  Even if your eighth grade English teacher wouldn't like this, it's not a slip of the tongue. It's what the speaker really intended to say.

• You'all move it on over 'cause I ain'ta gonna wait with this here dadbern mess o' glop much longer!

  I don't exactly know what this means, but I bet the speaker did. There are many varieties of English around the country and around the world and people who speak them are not making speech errors all the time. This is not standard English, but it's not a slip.

• Is that boughten bread or is it homemade?

  I say boughten all the time. It really is what I call processed bread you buy in the stores. In case you think that's nuts, I'll pass on this factoid: This summer I learned by rereading the Little House books, that Laura Ingalls and her family said 'boughten'. So, not only is it not a speech error, it's swell literature. So there!

• Oh, wook at the wittle bitty baby!

  Admit it: you've said this and when you did say it, you meant it just as it came out of your mouth. More about speech directed to children.

• Mama, the bunny go-ed with us to the store.

  Children go through regular stages in acquiring their native language or languages. With irregular verbs, a child will begin by using the form s/he has heard ('went' in this case). Then, at some point, the insight will arrive that you make verbs past tense by adding -ed. At that point, the child gleefully adds -ed to any and all verbs making go-ed and break-ed and see-ed. At this point, these aren't errors: they are the child's accurate productions, based on incomplete knowledge of the system. If you or I said go-ed or break-ed, it would probably either be because we were quoting a child or because we, in fact, had made a speech error. To read more about kids' errors, see The Slip FAQ.

• Utterance: I'm going to use a combine-ment of pink, yellow, and purple.
  Target: combination.

  This was said by my daughter on September 29, 2005, two days after her sixth birthday. It's not a speech error. She didn't know the word combination. She was making good use of the rules of English as she understood them. For what it's worth, if this were originally said by an adult, it *would* be a speech error since most adults probably do know the word combination. Now, at our house, we occasionally intentionally say 'combinement' for combination.

• I'd like a combine-ment of salsa, beans, cheese and onions on my nachos this time, please, Sr. Nacho Man.

  Because we say this on purpose, just because we think it's funny, it's not an error.

• Dude! We like, had, like, the whole thing like right there, and it was like so totally awesome.... and I was like: Man, this is cool!

  
  This may, like, drive you crazy, but it's not an error. People who use 'like' a lot aren't surprised to hear themselves doing it. It's true that they use it only half-consciously and can't explain to you where in a sentence it goes or what it means, but most people can't explain the use of 'the' and 'a' either. So, it's like, not an error, OK?

• My mother knew we didn't get very well, but I am sure she never imagined how bad might be two fierces closeted in the same cage, fighting each one for dominating the small territory.

  I truly love this example. It came from a composition in one of my writing classes in 1999 when I was teaching in San Germán, Puerto Rico. The author is a native speaker of Spanish with a fabulous mind and a well-used bilingual dictionary. This is just what she intended to write. She probably knew some of it was technically not correct English, but this was the best she could do at the time.

• After the ids-kay go to eep-slay, we can make some opcorn-pay, okay?!

  Admit it: you've said this, too, right? ... Or at least you did until the kids learned Pig Latin and used it faster and better than you could. Or, if you haven't said it yet, you will some happy day. Again, you meant it; it's not an error. The Google people mean it, too, when they do it.

• Oh, crap... this lousy piece of XXXX!

  I admit it: I said this... into a microphone... at church. It was exactly what I was thinking and it came out of my mouth perfectly ... Thanks, Speech Production System! As you might imagine, I wished later that I hadn't said it, but it was flawlessly executed and came out beautifully. Not an error in the linguistic sense ... just really bad judgment.

• Uh... well... that was a question that ... uh ... well, I um, guess I'll... I'll ... can you maybe ... uh ... ask that again?

  This is a recreation of me trying to answer a really weird question asked to me by a nice (but possibly from Mars) student in one of my 'Introduction to Linguistics' courses. It's not that my speech production system failed to execute my speech plan; it's that I never really had much of a plan when I started speaking. See the difference? Filled pauses like 'um' and 'uh' and restarts are not errors in speech. The simplest explanation of these phenomena is that they are what you do when you need more time to figure out what you are going to say, or when you change your mind in the middle of an utterance.

• Here's one to listen to: Tennis commentator Max Robertson loses track of what he's watching and where he is: Thanks to the BBC for the audio.

  The poor guy is clearly confused, but his problems (whatever they are) are not related to speech production.

  For more BBC mess ups that mostly are not speech errors, (but still good fun, mostly) see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/fungames/bloopers.shtml

Having eliminated all that, what is a slip of the tongue? They come in many kinds:

Slips can involve almost anything: single segments (that is, consonants and/or vowels), parts of words, words, phrases or whole sentences. Let's look at these one at a time.

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• Problems with Sounds
• Problems with Meaningful Parts of Words
• Problems with Whole Words
• Problems with Whole Sentences

It's possible to make a mistake when speaking that simply involves a single sound. In fact, up to sixty percent of English slips fit this description. Look at these examples:

• (Spoken by an irritated voter: September 2004, Bowling Green, Ohio)
  Utterance: The Gore pampaign
  Target: The Gore campaign
• (Spoken by one friend to another. the speaker is the mysterious KH, who is a brilliant shining source of error. Not sure I could live without her! What she meant was roughly: "That was our plan before we got that *&^%$* phone call.")
  Utterance: That was the pre-phone flan.
  Target: That was the pre-phone plan.
• (Spoken by one rattled spouse to the other)
  Utterance: "Don't you fake your shinger at me!"
  Target: "Don't you shake your finger at me!"

These poor, frustrated folk all had trouble organizing their consonants in the right places. In the first slip above, [p] in the second syllable of "campaign" came forward and replaced the initial consonant. This is called an anticipation because, presumably, it is a result of looking forward in the utterance and getting material before you need it. Anticipations, by the way, are the most common kind of phonological slip. Listen to the people around you for a day or two and you'll almost certainly hear a phonological anticipation or two.

In the second error, the [f] sound in phone replaces the [p] sound in the following word "plan". We say that this [f] sound (which occurred earlier in the utterance) perseverated. This means, it hung around longer than it should have and got reused. The technical term is 'phonological perseveration'. Beware: don't be confused by the fact that we spell the word 'phone' with a 'ph'. It's pronounced like 'f'. In speech errors, we are always working with sounds, never with the written forms of words. Yes, people do make errors in writing. Have a look at writing and typing and braille in the Slip FAQ.

The third slip above is the most dramatic. Here, the flustered speaker swapped two sounds creating what is commonly called a "spoonerism"--named for the good Anglican priest and scholar Rev. Dr. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930). In this example, the first sounds of "shake" and "finger" are exchanged. Technically, this is known as a kind of metathesis. (Note that the first sound of 'shake' is written with two letters, but it is a single sound just like the 'ph' above in 'phone'.)

These kinds of mistakes give us information about how we assemble the sounds that compose words. Imagine that you have a sort of typewriter in your head. Each key of this typewriter has on it one of the sounds in your language. There is a key for the first sound in 'f-inger' and the first sound in 'sh-ake' and the first sound in 's-pouse'. There is also a key for each different vowel sound. There is a key for the vowel sound in 'crook', one for 'croak' and one for 'crock'. When you want to speak a certain word, you have to hit these keys in the right order. To make this easier, keys that you are planning to hit light up. They also stay lit for a while after you hit them. That 'lighting up' - called 'activation' - makes it likely that any key you hit by accident will be one that is already part of your speaking plan. You might accidentally hit a lit-up key too early (an anticipation) or reuse a key you didn't mean to reuse (perseveration) or you might switch the order of two keys (a metathesis). It's quite rare to make a mistake that involves a sound that is not part of your plan, that is, to use a key that has not already been lit up for use in speaking.

Note that you can also make errors with vowels, with whole syllables, or even by putting the wrong stress pattern on a word. In languages with tone, you can make errors with that, too.

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• Utterance: 'We're not the only ones with screw looses!'
  Fromkin, 1973
• Utterance: I have to untie your shoes.
  Target: I have to retie your shoes.
• Utterance: The last time we dram.
  (dram rhymes with swam)
  Target: The last time we drummed.

It's sort of hard to know what exactly the target was in the first error. It was probably 'loose screws' or 'screws loose'. In either case, you can see that the 's' that belongs on 'screw-s' got moved onto 'loose'.

In the second the speaker (probably a frazzled parent) put the wrong prefix on the verb 'tie'.

In the third, the speaker failed to put the right past tense marker on the regular verb 'to drum'. Instead, she changed the vowel to make it fit one kind of pattern of past tenses in English: swim-swam, run-ran, ring-rang,. She did notice and corrected this one.

English has its share of morphological slips, but languages like Turkish and Spanish, where there are almost always more than one morpheme per word, have many more. For more information on Slips in other languages, see The Slip FAQ

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Lexical slips occur when you get the wrong word. They come in three sorts: semantically, phonologically, and environmentally mediated. We'll discuss them one at a time.

Semantically Mediated Lexical Slips

• Utterance: Honey, did you remember to put the milk back in the oven?
  Target: Honey, did you remember to put the milk back in the fridge?
• Utterance: Turn on the air! It's too blasted cold in here.
  Target: Turn on the air; it's too blasted hot in here!

In the first error, names for two kitchen appliances get mixed up. In the second, a word replaces its opposite. Both kinds are very common.

Parents are a good source of this kind of lexical error. If you grew up with brothers and sisters, you occasionally heard your mother yell things like this as her speech production mechanism struggled to come up with the right name for the right child:

• Mary, Laur... Carrie ... GRACE! Get over here right now!

The Girlfriend Slip

Of course, there's also that terrible moment when you realize that you have just addressed a new sweetheart by the name of his/her predecessor.

• Oh, Nellie, ... uh ... Laura, I do love you so!

These are ordinary examples of lexical slips of the tongue. With apologies to Dr. Freud, they don't necessarily mean anything about the inner workings of the subconscious mind. Names for familiar people are certainly semantically related and swap for one another just like the oven and the fridge do. Yes, I have heard of people making the Girlfriend Slip and emerging unscathed by immediately entering into a heart-felt discussion of speech errors and their genesis. See, linguistics is good for you!

My apologies for the slightly sexist name for this kind of slip. If you have a snazzier idea for what we should be calling these, e-mail me at once! This is overdue for a renaming.

Sometimes, two words get selected instead of one and get blended together. Here's a very nice word blend, given to us by none other than President George W. Bush. He was probably trying to say 'misunderstood' and underestimated' at the same time.

• They misunderestimated me.

President Bush is a pretty good source of speech errors, for which we thank him. For a collection of Bushisms, click here. Note that many Bushisms are not true speech errors but simply awkward turns of phrase - or things that may have sounded fine in context but look odd in print.

I have two daughters whose names are 'Claire' and 'Guo'. We often hear 'Guaire', 'Cluo', 'Gluo' and other variations at our house.

Phonologically Mediated Lexical Slips

Phonologically mediated slips occur when the two words, target and utterance, sound alike but are not necessarily related in meaning. With apologies in advance, I offer you the classic example from the collection of one of linguistics' best-known speech error researchers, Victoria Fromkin:

• Utterance: White Anglo-Saxon prostitute.
  Target: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

The two words involved have the same starting sounds, the same vowels, same stress pattern and same number of syllables. These errors are often called 'malapropisms'. The term comes from the name of Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy, 'The Rivals' (1775). For more fun with (primarily intentional) malapropisms see the Fun-With-Words Malaprop page or check out any of the many fabulous Smothers Brothers skits.

Interestingly, people get a lot more flack for a malapropism than they do for a semantically or environmentally mediated slip. The (unconscious) supposition is that the speaker did not actually know the right word. Although it is possible that some malapropisms are caused by lexical ignorance or misinformation, many of them derive from perfectly ordinary misfirings of the speech production system and indicate nothing about education or vocabulary size. It is even conceivable that people with larger vocabularies may make more such errors, since they do in fact have more words to choose from.

Sometimes these two factors--semantic similarity and phonological similarity--gang up together in speech errors. I don't have data to support this claim, but I'd guess that there'd be more name confusion in a household where the children are called Keith, Kent and Kurt than there would be in a household where the boys are named Thad, Rocko and Ethelbert which sound nothing alike. Next time you have to explain the 'girlfriend' slip to some irritated partner, consider whether the names you swapped for one another were also phonologically similar. More arguments on your side!

Environmentally Mediated Lexical Slips

These are errors caused when something you are looking at, or thinking about, interferes in your sentence.

• I would like a small fries and a salad.
  Target: I would like a small golden violin and a bow.

Yes, this one is mine. I couldn't resist putting this one in even if it is just flat weird. I was telling a story to my daughter. It was late, we were riding on an Amtrak to the middle of nowhere and had been riding for a very, very long time and I was starving, wondering if we'd miss the call to the dining car for lunch and thinking more about food than the pretty little story about musical fairies that I was inventing. These are the kind of slips Dr. Freud was talking about. They are reasonably rare, but do occur.

This kind of slip often occurs when something you are looking at, like a passing billboard, slips into a place in your utterance where something else should be.

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There are a number of ways things can go wrong with entire sentences. We don't mean sentence fragments, or other kinds of casual speech. We're talking about unintended utterances. These are not counted as syntactic slips:

• Get 'im!
• Not me! I ain't a-gonna get 'im! You get 'im!
• Naw. Let's just let 'im go then.
• 'kay.

Ordinary, error free speech is characterized by this sort of truncated talk. Listen to the people around you to see how often conversations really consist of fragmented sentences sprinkled with 'ums' and 'ers'.

Perhaps the easiest kind of syntactic slip to diagnose is a sentence combination error. In these errors, the speaker has two different ways of saying the same thing ready at the same time. Somehow, no decision is made to suppress one and go ahead with the other. The result is a combination of both sentences. Here's an example.

• Utterance: Get these little gnomes off my life!
  Target one: Get these little gnomes off my back!
  Target two: Get these little gnomes out of my life!

Sometimes, words get switched around:

• where wings take dream.
  where dreams take wing.
  President George W. Bush
  Note that, although the two words 'dream' and 'wing' switched places, the '-s' ending on the verb stayed.

It's sometimes difficult to pin down syntactic slips. It's hard to draw the line between inelegant speech and a genuine slip. Is this a slip?

• Does she have an office hour I could come see her during?
  I said this to the secretary of a faculty member at Southern Illinois University in 1992. I wanted desperately to make a good impression, but I was nervous.

Not really a slip. It was what I planned to say... I just didn't have a very good plan.

What about this? Can you find the one slip?

• okay - that's fine. Now, on the investi
  gation, you know, the Democratic break- in
  thing, we're back to the- in the, the problem
  area because the FBI is not under control,
  because Gray doesn't exactly know how to
  control them, and they have, their
  investigation is now leading into some
  productive areas, because they've been able
  to trace the money, not through the money
  itself, but through the bank, you know,
  sources - the banker himself. And, and it
  goes in some directions we don't want it to
  go. Ah, also there have been some things,
  like an informant came in off the street to
  the FBI in Miami, who was a photographer or
  has a friend who is a photographer who
  developed some films through this guy,
  Barker, and the films had pictures of
  Democratic National Committee letter head
  documents and things. So I guess, so it's
  things like that that are gonna, that are
  filtering in. Mitchell came up with
  yesterday, and John Dean analyzed very
  carefully last night and concludes, concurs
  now with Mitchell's recommendation that the
  only way to solve this, and we're set up
  beautifully to do it, ah, in that and
  that... the only network that paid any
  attention to it last night was NBC...
  

  TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDING OF A MEETING BETWEEN THE PRESIDENT (NIXON) AND H. R. HALDEMAN IN THE OVAL OFFICE ON JUNE 23, 1972 FROM 10:04 TO 11: 39 AM -- This is Haldeman speaking.
  Read the whole document http://nixon.archives.gov/find/tapes/watergate/trial/exhibit_01.pdf.
  For handy access to more of the Nixon transcripts and audio see http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/watergate.html.

This stretch of speech, like most, is characterized by restarts and hesitations. The change from 'conclude' to 'concur' might have been an error, but since the two words are similar in meaning, it's difficult to tell without listening to the audio.

With your own utterances, it is easier to tell what is a slip and what isn't. You have access to what you intended to say and can make a more-or-less intuitive determination. You usually feel genuinely surprised to hear what you actually said if it's a slip. Sometimes, you can even detect a slip before you say it. You have a feeling about what you were going to say and you notice that it was not going to be what you intended to say.

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