Psycholinguistics - Speech errors

Speech errors are errors in spontaneous speech and not the product of intentional ungrammaticality or dialects.

They occur when the speaker’s actual utterance differs in some way from the intended utterance, the so called target. The question is what kind of speech errors can occur and how these errors can be explained with the help of different models of speech production.

My termpaper is concerned with different types of speech errors and two important models of speech production by Levelt and Garrett. I will introduce Levelt’s model of speech production first. Then I will explain different types of speech errors with reference to this model. In chapter 4 I will give own examples of German speech errors from everyday life and TV, try to put them into Levelt’s model and explain them. Afterwards I will introduce the speech production model of Garrett and give two examples of speech errors with reference to this model. At the end of this term paper I will to give a short summary and compare the two models briefly.