Laboratory induction of verbal slips: A new method for psycholinguistic research

Abstract

A new method has been developed for testing hypotheses of speech production, especially those which seek to determine the causes of phonological encoding breakdowns, and thus to determine the nature of normal phonological processing. Specifically, a description is provided for a procedure by which experimental subjects may be induced to accidentally commit the type of verbal slip known as a “spoonerism.” The procedure provides the experimenter with control over the subject's speech output, sufficient to insure that the average subject's articulation on up to 30% of designated word pairs will be in the form of an accidental spoonerism error planned by the experimenter. Encoding hypotheses testable through laboratory induction of verbal slips are discussed briefly.