"Did I Say That?" Talking with two left tongues On May 29 of last year, Andrew Gilligan, a BBC reporter for the radio news program Today, stated that the British government inserted a claim into a dossier on Iraq that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction. According to Gilligan, Britain did this “knowing it was wrong”. During a September 18 inquiry, Gilligan retracted his original claim, stating that the quoted phrase was a “slip of the tongue”. What defines a slip of the tongue? Most people would describe them as something spoken unintentionally. But is that definition adequate enough? Gilligan’s statement that his reporting was faulty due to the wrong words coming out of his mouth may be as errant as the slip he apologized for. Researching slips of the tongue is encumbered because people have to be waiting for errors, hear and transcribe them correctly, and then try to draw conclusions on why they occurred. But what research has been done shows that the following four error types repeat themselves frequently: 1) Word-opposite reversal, like black for white, boy for girl; 2) Word exchanges, like he is planting the garden in the flowers for he is planting the flowers in the garden; 3) Sound exchanges, like shinking sips for sinking ships; and 4) “Stranding” errors, as in he is schooling to go for he is going to school. Research tends to show that the exchanging of sounds, as in type 3, is quite common. For example, “bate of dirth”, “cuck cape”, “stee franding”, and “sedden duth” instead of “date of birth”, “cupcake”, “free standing”, and “sudden death”. Those recording these errors tend to believe that the structured words are assembled in the brain for production before their sounds are. It seems highly irregular to conceive of words in the brain being distinct from their phonological form, and one could argue that the exchanging of sounds, for example, is a mere swell in the complicated ocean the tongue must swim to get words out as rapidly as it does. Whether slips of the tongue are accidents of the tongue or accidents of the brain, they are almost as highly regulated as real sentences. It seems that switches only happen between adjacent words and in most cases, the words switched fall into the same class (like noun, verb, etc.). One example would be the one provided above, “He is planting the garden in the flowers.” “Garden” and “flowers” are both nouns, and therefore seemed like excellent candidates for a swap. Since “planting” is a verb form, it wasn’t a more accessible selection for replacement. However, take the sentence representing the “stranding” error in type 4, “He is schooling to go.” “School” and “go” are a noun and verb, respectively, but were switched anyway. Note, though, that the “-ing” portion of “go” did not move with “go” to the end of the sentence, but remained where it was to affect “schooling”, meaningless in this context. “He is school to going”, in my estimable opinion, is a slip of the tongue that would rarely occur naturally. And why? Because it’s not a syntactically appropriate sentence. More clearly, “he is school” (as in, “he is go”, “he is eat”: all lack the “-ing”) does not fall into the language structure that was defined above, the one that put words into order before the phonology came into play. Neither sentence (“schooling to go”, “school to going”), make sense in English, but the portion “schooling to go” seems to fit, if bulkily, into the shoes of English word formation. For this reason, aberrant slips of the tongue are able to shed at least a bit of light on language operation in the mind. So back to the statement by the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan. Was adding the entire phrase “knowing it was wrong” in a dossier about the British government a true slip of the tongue? Highly doubtful. But is does make a good excuse when you’ve said something you clearly didn’t intend to say. Material for this article taken from the books Psycholinguistics, by Michael Garman, and Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasiology, by David Caplan. J. Everett R.