Who has never made a mistake while speaking and confused one word for another? Is this just a mistake or does this verbal slip indicate something deeper on a psychological level? Is it perhaps a message from the unconscious? It is estimated that for every 1,000 words spoken, we make one or two mistakes. If we take into account that the average rate of expression is 150 words per minute, an error would occur every seven minutes of continuous conversation. Therefore, most of us make between 7 and 22 verbal errors every day, although sometimes we do not realize some of them.
Why do verbal slips occur?
In 1901 Sigmund Freud coined these “blunders” with the unpronounceable name “fehlleistungen” (in Spanish it would be wrong acts). Freud considered that it was an unconscious thought, need or desire that was revealed in this way, through speech.
Thus, the Freudian slip is invoked to explain strange and socially embarrassing behavior, such as when a man greets his host’s wife by saying: “delighted to win” because he really feels a sexual attraction for her and would like to predominate over her husband.
Freud also tells another example in which one of his patients, stressed by his financial difficulties, tried to refuse to continue taking the medication by saying: “Please don’t give me any more receipts because I can’t swallow them”. Obviously, these types of errors are not accidental but rather an expression of a latent need.
However, a contemporary of Freud, Rudolf Meringer, provided a much less “exciting” explanation for these slips. According to this philologist, linguistic errors would simply be banana peels in the way of the sentence, simple accidental changes of linguistic units, nothing more, nothing less.
Modern research has taken up this topic but from a different perspective. Gary Dell, professor of linguistics and psychology at the University of Illinois, maintains that slips linguae are the sign of a person’s ability to use language and its components.
In his opinion, concepts, words and sounds are interconnected in the brain through three networks: lexical, semantic and phonological. And speech arises from their interaction. But from time to time these networks, which operate through a process he called “activation spread”, travel in fits and starts. As a consequence, the result may be a slip of the tongue or an error in speaking.
For example, let’s imagine that we want to say the word “cultivate”. At this moment our mind activates a semantic network that is made up of no less and no more than about 30,000 words. At this point, all the meanings related to the word cultivate and even our personal experiences with that term also come into play.
As if that were not enough, our phonological network must be activated to look for the appropriate sounds to pronounce the word. And everything does not end there, we must also look for grammatical correspondence so that the word is heard properly within the sentence. As you can imagine, it is very easy for our brain to get confused. The strange thing would be if it didn’t.
For this reason, sometimes we only manage to pronounce the first syllables of the wrong word since we immediately realize the mistake and solve it. Of course, it will be much easier to confuse words with a similar sound, such as: hospitality with hostility or insinuate with incinerate. Thus, most verbal lapses are nothing more than banana peels produced by an “overload” of the brain.
But others are not!
What do errors hide when speaking?
Some errors when speaking can be caused by the incidence of meanings. For example, when we think of a person’s name, experiences related to that person immediately come to mind. In this way, those experiences or desires could be the cause of the error. In short, they would be verbal lapses caused by intrusive thoughts.
The problem is that the more we try to suppress these thoughts, the more frequent they become and, therefore, it is not uncommon for them to end up manifesting themselves through linguistic errors. Of course, the more distracted we are, the more mistakes we will make.
This is demonstrated by a curious experiment developed at the University of California in which psychologists asked heterosexual men to talk about their professions in front of a provocatively dressed woman. It was noted that these men made more lapses of sexual content than those who had been interviewed by another man. This is because our brain has a limited attention capacity and cannot control so many processes at the same time.
To avoid these mistakes there is a fairly simple solution: speak slowly to think about what we are going to say.
Reference:
Pincott, J. (2012, March) Slips of the tongue . In: Psychology Today .
