An experimental investigation into the perception of slips of the tongue

Examined the hypothesis that many slips of the tongue (SOTs) go undetected. One artificial phonemic or nonphonemic SOT was inserted in 1 or 2 words of 27 short sentences. The SOTs were carefully constructed to adhere to the normal linguistic patterns and laws governing those that occur in normal spontaneous speech. A further 73 sentences were employed as a control. All sentences were masked by white noise at 0 db S/N ratio in order to sensitize test conditions for the listeners such that any differences in the perception of various tongue slip types would be maximized. 20 normal hearing adults (mean age 23) were asked to listen to the sentences and transcribe exactly what they heard. Results demonstrate that phonemic SOTs were perceived significantly less often than nonphonemic SOTs. A further finding indicated that nonphonemic SOTs disturbed the correct perception of segments in the rest of the sentence more than did phonemic SOTs.