Experimental verbal slip studies: A review and an editing model of language encoding

Abstract

Spoken language is encoded extremely rapidly and by exceedingly complex cognitive operations, yet it is amazingly free of errors. In recent years there has been debate on the question of how the speech‐production system guards itself against erroneous output. One explanation is that the system is sufficiently sophisticated and rule‐governed in its early message‐formulation stages so as generally to avoid constructing anomalous plans. The authors have argued elsewhere, however, for an explanation whereby anomalous and other error plans are formulated during early production stages but are vetoed and corrected (i.e., “edited”) during later encoding stages. We have yet to synthesize these arguments into a coherent encoding model, however, and that is our purpose here. An “Editing” model of speech production is presented, featuring prearticulatory evaluations of impending speech segments via feedback to a spreading‐activation lexicon which is susceptible to semantic, syntactic, phonological, and extralinguistic influences.