'Not by the chair of my hinny hin hin': some general properties of slips of the tongue in young children.
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.
Jaeger
J J
JJ
Department of Linguistics, State University of New York, Buffalo 14260.
D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech; D014705:Verbal Behavior