Speech errors and word form encoding

The properties of everyday slips of the tongue provide useful constraints on theories of language production. This chapter focuses on phonological errors, slips that occur during word-form encoding, and argues that these errors are strongly sensitive to familiarity. Unfamiliar word forms are vulnerable to slipping, and the resulting errors are themselves driven toward familiar pronunciations. The influence of familiarity on errors is explained through the learning and processing mechanisms of connectionist models. Specifically, the chapter discusses the effect of target-word frequency on word-form encoding, the role of linguistic structure in shaping what is pronounced, and the hypothesis that phonological errors reflect feedback between planned speech sounds and the mental lexicon.