Slips of the Tongue: Speech Errors in First and Second Language Production (review)

Nanda Poulisse introduces her book by remarking that although errors have served as a focus in second language research, the focus has been on errors of knowledge or competence. Errors of performance have received almost no attention. This is the void which this book aims to fill.

P sets three research goals for her project: to present the results of an extensive study of the occurrence of slips of the tongue in the speech of second language learners; to compare slips of the tongue produced by learners with speech errors produced by speakers in their native language, assessing similarities and differences between native and second-language errors; and to interpret the L2 errors from the point of view of speech production modeling.

In Ch. 1, P surveys previous work on slips of the tongue, beginning with the paper-and-pencil collections of Meringer and Mayer in 1895. She organizes her survey in terms of fourteen major claims based on commonly observed regularities. The claims tend to address error types and their frequency of occurrence. For example: Anticipations are more frequent than perseverations; and errors occur more frequently in stressed than in unstressed syllables. Ch. 2 surveys the rather sparse literature on speech errors produced by children, and Ch. 3 examines the even smaller literature on L2 slips of the tongue, concluding that, on the whole, native and nonnative errors are highly comparable.

The remainder of the book thoroughly describes P’s second language speech error project, including information about the speakers, data acquisition, definitions, and classifications of errors. P’s focus is on the claims found in descriptions of speech errors in L1.

P recorded her Dutch participants engaging in various tasks using English, in order to have available a permanent record for careful examination. As a control, she also recorded her participants speaking in their native Dutch. In general, the participants produced more errors in L2 than in L1, and the number of errors they made was inversely related to their L2 proficiency. When errors occurred, they arose at the level of lexical access, morphological encoding of verbs, and phonology, suggesting that these are areas in which L2 production processes have not yet become automatic. According to P, almost one-third of the errors found their origin in the learner’s first language. Most of these were lexical substitutions, curiously including blends arising from both languages, for example ‘cwame’ from Dutch ‘kwam’ and English ‘came’ (151).

P’s presentation of her work is admirably thorough. The details of her study and the rationale for her decisions are always eminently clear. For readers interested in the psychology of L2 use, the book provides a great deal to think about.