Freudian Slips: Fact or Friction? ...ahem, Fiction

Some people believe that when we make a speech error, we reveal what we’re really thinking, providing an unintended window into our deepest, darkest secrets – hence the term “Freudian slip.” A major issue with many of Freud’s theories is that they are not falsifiable, meaning there is no way to demonstrate that they are bogus through scientific testing. Fortunately, research in the field of psycholinguistics provides evidence that the concept of a Freudian slip is, for the most part, bogus.

That’s not to say that speech errors are completely random, or that they don’t provide some insight into what our brains are doing behind the scenes while we are speaking. Speech errors do provide a window into the inner workings of the mind – just not your mind in particular. Different types of speech errors shed light on the processes involved in planning and producing spoken language. Here are a few examples of different types of speech errors:

Word Errors:

My mother is notorious for calling members of the family the wrong name, which has led to a running family joke: when this kind of name selection error happens, we just keep saying more and more names –  cousins, aunts, grandparents, even family pets get thrown into the mix. The reason word-selection errors occur is that thinking about one concept leads to mental activation of related concepts. For example, when my mother intends to say my name, my brother’s name sometimes comes out instead because he and I are closely related in my mother’s mind.

Part-of-word Errors:

Sometimes parts of words end up in the wrong place in a sentence, rather than entire words relocating. These parts of words are not random: they are parts of words that still carry meaning, called morphemes. Some common examples of morphemes are the plural ‘s’ ending, the ‘-ly’ adverb ending, and the past tense ‘-ed’ ending. Examples of morpheme exchange errors include saying “close offed” instead of “closed off” or saying “quicking thinkly” instead of “thinking quickly.”

Sound Errors:

A common sound-related error involves exchanging sounds from two words in a sentence. These exchanges are not random, however: similar types of sounds tend to be swapped (for example, swapping two vowels), and sound exchanges are more likely involve sounds at the beginnings of words. Additionally, clusters of sounds that go together are not broken up: “toy blocks” could become “bloy tocks” but not “boy tlocks.”

Sound exchanges that create real words are more likely to occur than ones that do not. For example, “time clock” produced as “climb tock” is more likely than “time point” being produced as “pime toint.” This tendency towards producing real words when making speech errors is known as the lexical bias effect.

Mixed Errors:

The lexical bias effect serves as evidence that speech production is not a simple, feed-forward process. We don’t always have an entire sentence fully planned before we produce it, and how we finish an utterance can be affected by how we start it. Sometimes different linguistic features (such as meanings and sounds) interact during speech production. Here is a real example that I have heard: “Sarah rushed her daughter – no – husband to the doctor.” This error likely began as a word exchange error: the speaker had the concepts of “husband” and “doctor” activated in their mind, but they may have started to say the sentence with these two words in the wrong order (i.e., “Sarah rushed her doctor to the husband”). Despite differences in spelling, “doctor” and “daughter” for most speakers of North American English, the beginning of both of these words is “dah” (unless you speak a dialect of English that does not have the cot-caught merger – but that’s a story for another time). The speaker may have realized the word swap and need for repair after they had already begun to say “doctor.” Meaning and sound interact at this point: the word that’s being said in the wrong place (“doctor”) becomes a word that is conceptually related to the one the speaker intended to say at this point (“husband”). “Daughter” is produced as a result.

So, the next time someone accuses you of a Freudian slip when you make a speech error, you can harness the power of science to refute their claim and avoid embarrassment. Thanks, science!

That being said, even science may not be powerful enough to persuade your partner to forgive you for accidentally calling them by the name of your most recent ex, or worse – “mom.”