Slips of The Tongue: A Comparative and Contrastive Study of Spoken Cairene Arabic and Spoken English

Abstract

The speech production process is a system of hidden operations. One way of examining the operation of any system whose internal workings are hidden is to look carefully at the kinds and amounts of errors that "slip through" in everyday processing. Thus, speech errors are the breakdowns in the language system which give insights into speech_ production; they are considered as "windows to the mind". The investigation presented here is a systematic collection and analysis of (1023) utterances involving (1102) spontaneous speech errors in colloquial Cairene Arabic. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the slips of the tongue - a phenomenon which has been widely studied in several languages but which has received little attention in Arabic. The data have been collected by the pen-and-pad method, and is sorted into carefully chosen categories using a set of explicit criteria.