On-Air Slips of the Tongue: A Psycholinguistic-Acoustic Analysis

The sixteen SOTs examined are on-air ones produced by native English TV presenters and anchors. Although these SOTs seem funny, they reflect a great deal about how naturalistic speech is assembled and produced. Acoustic analysis is also brought to bear on the present investigation with the aim of providing accurate findings. Several psycholinguistic models are invoked in the analysis, and Praat 6 is used to provide spectrograms and waveforms for the errors detected. The present study concludes that the SOTs examined in the present corpus reveal much about the processing of erroneous speech. Substitution errors, being the most prominent, exhibit uniform processing through a replacement on phonemic or higher levels. As for anticipation errors, they prove to be irregular in their production. Other errors are sparse in the present corpus, and cannot be generalized over a wide range of instances, since they occur either once or twice.