Incidental word and sound errors in young speakers
Frank N. K. Wijnen · First Language · 1991
Abstract The question that is addressed by this study is whether the language production mechanism in children differs from the adult system. This problem is approached by comparing some 250 incidental, i.e., nonsystematic word and sound errors extracted from a corpus of tape-recorded spontaneous speech of two 2- to 3-year-old boys, with tape-recorded speech errors in the London-Lund corpus (Garnham, Shillcock, Brown, Mill, & Cutler, 1982. In A. Cutler, Ed. Slips of the tongue and language production . Berlin: Mouton) . The adult data generally replicated findings reported in the literature, and, in turn, most of the error patterns in the children were similar to those in the adults, except for three differences. First, error frequency is considerably higher in children than in adults. Second, lexical substitutions involving phonologically similar words occur less often in the children than in the adults. Finally, in contrast to the adult corpus, the child corpus contains sound errors in function words. These differences are interpreted as indications of gradual developmental alterations in the language production mechanism, mainly reflecting the degree of practice and automatization.