Laboratory Verification of “Freudian” Slips of the Tongue as Evidence of Prearticulatory Semantic Editing

Earlier research has shown that spoonerisms (e.g., wage rate → rage wait) can be elicited by a laboratory technique in which subjects attempt to articulate a target (wage rate) preceded by biasing word items containing certain phonological characteristics of the designed error (rage wait). The frequency of errors on various targets depends more upon the linguistic characteristics of their potential spoonerism than upon the characteristics of the targets themselves, suggesting that subjects “edit” phoneme strings prior to articulation. Phonological and lexical criteria have been established within the prearticulatory editing operations. The present report describes two experiments designed to determine whether these prearticulatory edits involve semantic criteria. In Experiment 1, the base-rate of errors produced by the phonetic bias technique was dramatically increased by adding (to the phonological bias) items which were semantically synonymous to the designed target errors. In Experiment 2, the base-rat...