Incidental word and sound errors in young speakers

Little is known about language production mechanism in young speakers and, in particular, whether it differs in some way from the adult system. The study of language production in adults has benefited greatly from the analysis of speech errors. Arguably, the analysis of language production in children should be approached in the same way. In this study, children’s speech errors incidental rather than systematic errors are operationally defined as relatively infrequent deviations from the child’s current linguistic standard (as opposed to the adult standard). Following these criteria, some 250 word and sound errors were extracted from a corpus of tape-recorded spontaneous speech of two boys, aged 2 and 3. In order to answer the question whether error patterns in adults and children differ, the child data were compared with tape-recorded speech errors made by adults in the London-Lund corpus of spontaneous speech (Garnham, Shillcock, Brown, Mill & Cutler 1982). It appeared that almost all types of error that are produced by adult speakers also occur in the child corpus. Error frequency, however, is much higher in children than in adults. As regards lexical errors, substitution is the most frequent error type in both children and adults, but the word classes that are most often involved are different: nouns in adults, verbs in children. In both populations, however, the word classes of the substituted and substituting words usually match. Both semantic and phonological similarities between the words involved in substitutions are more frequent in adults than in children, and a trade-off between semantic similarity and phonological similarity, which is observed in the adult corpus, is not found in the child data.