What Slips of the Tongue Reveal About the Mind
Verbal mistakes expose the inner workings of language.
Updated June 2, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
During a recent episode of The View , co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin was discussing Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding when she accidentally referred to it as a “funeral.” Realizing the mistake, she quickly corrected herself, but the slip immediately caught the attention of viewers.
Most people have experienced similar moments. A current partner is called by an ex’s name. A speaker accidentally substitutes one word for another and ends up saying something completely unintended. Such verbal blunders can be embarrassing and amusing, but they are also revealing. Why does the brain seem to know exactly what it wants to say, only for something entirely different to come out of our mouths?
The Brain’s Internal Editor
Human speech is not produced in a single step. As people speak, they continuously monitor what they are about to say and what they have just said. This process acts like an internal editor, catching countless mistakes before they ever reach the outside world.
Most errors never make it past this monitoring system. Occasionally, however, one slips through. When that happens, speakers may pause, restart a sentence, or correct themselves mid-utterance. They may also produce fillers such as “um,” “uh,” or “well” while searching for the right word or planning what to say next.
Although these hesitations are often criticized, research suggests they serve important communicative functions (Stollznow, 2026). They help speakers hold the floor, signal uncertainty, and buy time for word retrieval. Rather than signs of poor communication, they are evidence of a flexible and adaptive language system at work. Studies have found that fillers occur regularly in everyday conversation across languages, underscoring just how normal these pauses are.
Psychologists have long been fascinated by slips of the tongue because they provide clues about how speech is organized in the mind.
One particularly revealing type of error is the spoonerism. Named after the 19th-century British clergyman and Oxford academic Reverend William Archibald Spooner, spoonerisms occur when sounds are accidentally swapped between words. For example, a speaker might say “a lack of pies” instead of “a pack of lies.”
Whether Spooner himself produced all the famous examples attributed to him is doubtful. Stories credit him with utterances such as “You have hissed all my mystery lectures” instead of “You have missed all my history lectures,” but many of these quotations were probably invented by students and admirers. Regardless of their authenticity , the term stuck.
What makes spoonerisms so interesting is what they reveal about speech planning. For sounds to switch places between words, the brain must already be preparing multiple words at once. The error suggests that speech is not assembled one word at a time. Instead, several parts of an upcoming phrase appear to be activated simultaneously before they are spoken.
Speech errors, therefore, provide valuable evidence about how language is constructed in the mind (Nozari and Novick, 2017). They suggest that sounds, syllables, meanings, and grammatical structures are processed separately and then rapidly assembled into fluent speech. Occasionally, one component ends up in the wrong place, exposing the normally hidden processes that make communication possible.
No discussion of verbal mistakes would be complete without Sigmund Freud.
Freud believed that slips of the tongue offered a window into the unconscious mind. According to his theory, hidden wishes, repressed thoughts, and unresolved conflicts could inadvertently reveal themselves through speech errors (Poscheschnik & Crepaldi, 2022). The popular expression “ Freudian slip” emerged from this idea (although Freud himself used the German term Fehlleistungen , meaning “faulty actions” or “misperformances”).
Modern psychology has generally moved away from Freud’s interpretation. Most speech errors can be explained by factors such as distraction, fatigue, stress , or the competition between similar words and sounds in memory .
Yet some research suggests that the content of speech errors is not always entirely random. In a now-famous experiment from the 1970s, researchers placed participants in situations designed to make either anxiety or sexual thoughts particularly salient. The subjects didn’t make more errors overall, but the themes of their mistakes often reflected what was occupying their minds. Individuals made slips related to stress when feeling anxious and slips with sexual associations when those ideas had been primed.
The Value of Verbal Mistakes
Speech errors are often treated as signs of carelessness or incompetence. In reality, they reveal the opposite.
The occasional slip of the tongue highlights the extraordinary speed and complexity of human language. Every conversation requires countless cognitive operations to occur seamlessly and almost instantaneously. Most of the time, the system works so efficiently that its complexity goes unnoticed.
When a television host accidentally refers to a wedding as a funeral, or when someone momentarily loses track of the right name or word, the mistake briefly exposes the machinery behind fluent speech. For psychologists and linguists, these moments are more than sources of humor . They are small but revealing clues about how thoughts become words and how the mind manages one of its most sophisticated tasks.
Far from being flaws, slips of the tongue are reminders of the remarkable cognitive system that makes language possible in the first place. Read about this topic and more in Karen Stollznow’s new book, Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language .
Stollznow, Karen. (2026). Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language . Cambridge University Press.
Nozari, N., & Novick, J. (2017). Monitoring and control in language production. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 26 (5), 403-410.
Poscheschnik, G., & Crepaldi, G. (2022). Only chance and circumstances? Or, how Freudian are Freudian slips? A review of research literature concerning parapraxes. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 39 (3), 189–197.
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Karen Stollznow, Ph.D., is a linguist, columnist and podcaster who researches anomalous beliefs and practices about language.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.