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.