A speech error, commonly referred to as a slip of the tongue[1] (Latin: lapsus linguae, or occasionally self-demonstratingly, lipsus languae) or misspeaking, is a deviation (conscious or unconscious) from the apparently intended form of an utterance.
[1] During live broadcasts on TV or on the radio, for example, nonprofessional speakers and even hosts often make speech errors because they are under stress.
[8] Charles F. Hockett explains that "whenever a speaker feels some anxiety about possible lapse, he will be led to focus attention more than normally on what he has just said and on what he is just about to say.
Sigmund Freud assumed that speech errors are the result of an intrapsychic conflict of concurrent intentions.
Speech errors can affect different kinds of segments or linguistic units: Speech production is a highly complex and extremely rapid process, and thus research into the involved mental mechanisms proves to be difficult.
[10] Investigating the audible output of the speech production system is a way to understand these mental mechanisms.
[13] For that reason, the study of speech errors is significant for the construction of performance models and gives insight into language mechanisms.
Schachter et al. (1991) conducted an experiment to examine if the numbers of word choices affect pausing.
They can take multiple forms, such as additions, substitutions, deletions, exchanges, anticipations, perseverations, shifts, and haplologies M.F.
One kind is a lexical bias which shows that the slips people generate are more often actual words than random sound strings.
[18] Since the 1980s, the word misspeaking has been used increasingly in politics to imply that errors made by a speaker are accidental and should not be construed as a deliberate attempt to misrepresent the facts of a case.
As such, its usage has attracted a degree of media coverage, particularly from critics who feel that the term is overly approbative in cases where either ignorance of the facts or intent to misrepresent should not be discarded as possibilities.
[19][20] The word was used by a White House spokesman after George W. Bush seemed to say that his government was always "thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people" (a classic example of a Bushism), and more famously by then American presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who recalled landing in at the US military outpost of Tuzla "under sniper fire" (in fact, video footage demonstrates that there were no such problems on her arrival).