Slip of the Tongue

A slip of the tongue is a spontaneous, unintended error in spoken language production in which what a speaker actually says deviates from what the speaker clearly intended to say, even though the speaker knows the correct form and is not otherwise impaired, encompassing a range of specific error types such as exchanging the initial sounds of two nearby words, substituting an unintended but related word, or blending two intended words into one. Systematic scientific study of naturally occurring slips began with the compilation of large corpora of real-world speech errors, most notably by the linguist Victoria Fromkin beginning in the late 1960s, and such corpora have provided key evidence for models proposing that spoken language production unfolds through a sequence of distinct planning stages, such as selecting an intended meaning, then selecting the words that express it, then assembling the individual sounds of those words, because the specific pattern of a given slip often points to which stage of that process broke down. A slip of the tongue is distinguished from a Freudian slip, documented elsewhere in this section, which specifically frames such an error as revealing a suppressed or unconsciously motivated intention, a much narrower and more specific claim than the general linguistic phenomenon of an unintended production error.