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‘Not by the chair of my hinny hin hin’: some general properties of slips of the tongue in young children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Jeri J. Jaeger
Jeri J. Jaeger*
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Buffalo
*
Department of Linguistics, 685 Baldy Hall, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
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Abstract

Young children's slips of the tongue are a rich source of information about developing language processing and storage mechanisms. This paper presents an analysis of 907 slips from 32 children, ages 1;4–6;0, collected in naturalistic settings. It is found that these children make most of the same types and proportions of slips as adults: phonological errors outnumber lexical, which exceed phrasal. In phonological errors, anticipations are most common, followed by perseverations and exchanges; children make more completed anticipations and exchanges than adults, probably due to less mature self-monitoring. Like adults, children make more substitutions than additions or omissions. Children's slips support a theory of speech planning in which propositional, syntactic, intonational, content word, function word and phonological levels have somewhat independent status; however, there is little evidence for a derivational morphology level at this age.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 335 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, December 1987. I would like to thank LouAnn Gerken, Karin Michelson, Robert Van Valin and David Wilkins for their input to this paper. This research was partly supported by a U. C. Davis Faculty Research Grant, and much of the data was collected while the author was on the faculty at U. C. Davis.

References

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