slip of the tongue

n. A slip of the tongue (also called speech error, Freudian slip, lapsus linguae, spoonerism) is an unintentional error occurring during speech production. In a famous example, the president of the Austrian Parliament said, “I take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed!” It is tempting to interpret errors such as this as revealing aspects of the struggle between id and ego, as proposed by Sigmund Freud (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901). However, these errors are more insightful about the operation and sequencing of language production routines. The study of speech error corpora has revealed that slips of the tongue never result in ungrammatical or impossible strings, and that errors are subject to the phonological, morphological, and syntactic principles of the language in which they are produced. Some errors, such as the one quoted, involve exchanges between related words (closed and open) and thus presumably happen at the early stage of lexical access. Others involve the exchange of two morphemes within a sentence, such as There are too many churches in our minister, where church and minister are exchanged, an error suggesting a separate stage in production during which inflectional morphemes are added at structurally appropriate positions. Other slips involve exchanges between phonemes, such as a smuck in the tid, where the intended expression was a stick in the mud, and thus are seen as reflecting a stage during which phonological representations are built. – EMF