Read My Slips: Speech Errors Show How Language Is Processed

Researchers are analyzing spoonerisms and other slips of the tongue to help understand how humans--and even apes--can comprehend and use language

Kanzi, a 27-year-old bonobo, knows the difference between a blackberry and a hot dog. But sometimes, when researchers asked him to touch the abstract visual symbol, called a lexigram, that means blackberry, he touched the lexigram for hot dog, blueberries, or cherries instead.

Kanzi's errors weren't random mistakes, nor an indication of apes' language limitations, says Heidi Lyn, a comparative cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, U.K. Rather, they show the complex way in which his mind had organized the lexigrams. For example, if Kanzi made a mistake when asked for "blackberry," he was more likely than chance to choose a lexigram for another fruit, much as you or I might say "red" instead of "black," says Lyn, whose paper on Kanzi's mistakes was published online in Animal Cognition in April and will appear in print later this year or early next.

Analyzing errors for insight into the covert mental processes of animals is a new direction for a technique that language scientists have used for 40 years to study language processing in humans....

To read the full piece, go here.