Speech Errors are the most widely recognized and discussed type of Language

Processing Errors. They have been included as a research topic in many fields of study,

e.g. cognitive linguistics, psychology and medicine. These studies have shown that

speech errors are inevitable and very common: they can be observed in every kind of

utterance, regardless of its formality or speakers’ age, socioeconomic background or

environmental surroundings. Even though they are so ubiquitous, they are usually not

paid attention to. Nevertheless, they might be representing a way of understanding how

the human brain functions and why we dysfunction at times.

In this paper, selected speech error examples from Fromkin’s Speech Error

Database were analyzed in terms of the changes in meanings from target utterances into

error utterances and the probable causes of the errors with the aim to discover any

patterns of occurrence among erroneous speech. The focus of the examples has been

lexical errors in nouns and adjectives.

According to results of the analysis, contextual and environmental factors appear to

contribute to the making of the errors in many different ways, along with the speakers’

internal thoughts and representations of phenomena related to the utterances. These

contributions could be accounted for various reasons. Along the keywords included in

the search for patterns, distinctive features may only be observed in examples of

opposite meaning. Thus, speech errors seem to have no typical ways of occurrence; still,

some observable similarities among examples may be useful in further studies.