Syntactic criteria in prearticulatory editing: Evidence from laboratory-induced slips of the tongue

Earlier studies of laboratory-induced verbal slips have provided a partial model of “prearticulatory editing” in speech production—a cognitive process by which impending phoneme strings are evaluated for their linguistic and extralinguistic integrity prior to articulation. These studies have provided evidence of editing based upon phonotactic, lexical, and semantic criteria. The present study demonstrates the existence of syntactic editing criteria via laboratory-induced spoonerisms. Experiment I demonstrates that syntactically legitimate spoonerism errors (e.g., “mice saw”) are more frequent than syntactically anomalous spoonerism errors (e.g., “mice sees”), suggesting that prearticulatory phonological processing decisions are modified on the basis of syntactic criteria. Experiment II demonstrates that the criteria for syntactically legnitimate spoonerisms can be influenced by aspects of the syntactic context. Implications are discussed.