Have you ever imagined how we can produce words to communicate each other?
By Cinthia Martinez
English Major
UPNFM- Honduras
Each of us feels curious to know how, by using the tongue, we humans are able to pronounce sounds. The tongue is connected to our memory and it is very curious how the memory can send signals that we transform into words and produce them with our mouth; the power to communicate with other people is marvelous. Over the years, psycholinguists have become excited about a new way of discovering how we put words into our mouths: they look at what happens when we trip over our tongues. We can see why slips of the tongue provide the data that delight psycholinguists; they allow us to peek in on the production process because we know what the speaker intended to say, but the unintentional mistake freezes the production process momentarily and catches the linguistic mechanism in one instance of production. Sigmund Freud said that Slips of the Tongue were important because alike dreams, they help to reveal the unconscious mind; however some psycholinguists have ignored this theory about slips of the tongue because of variety of reasons. When we speak, sometimes we make errors within the boundaries and the framework of a certain language structure as if we had intentionally planned our slips to fit an appropriate linguistic slot, this situation is called psychologically real. As we already know there are vowels and consonants and these are characterized into various phonetic groups. Sometimes we understand the pronunciation of the words in a wrong way because some consonants and vowels have the same sound and that is why ESL students make mistakes but is normal, however slips of the tongue also reveal that when we formulate speech, we are not only influenced by the sound system of the language, we are speaking, we are also conditioned by the way words are put together in that language.
16 Mind Explorer/ October, 2013