37.3490, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 - Slips of the Tongue Across Levels and Languages: From Distinctive Features to Syntax (Slovakia)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3490. Fri 23 Oct 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3490, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2027 - Slips of the Tongue Across Levels and Languages: From Distinctive Features to Syntax (Slovakia)

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Date: 21-Oct-2026
From: Renáta Gregová [renata.gregova at upjs.sk]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2027 - Slips of the Tongue Across Levels and Languages: From Distinctive Features to Syntax


Workshop at SLE 2027 - Slips of the Tongue Across Levels and
Languages: From Distinctive Features to Syntax
Short Title: SLE 2027

Date: 25-Aug-2027 - 28-Aug-2027
Location: Košice, Slovakia
Contact: Renáta Gregová
Contact Email: renata.gregova at upjs.sk
Meeting URL:
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2027/workshop-proposals-call-for-abstracts/

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Morphology; Phonology;
Psycholinguistics; Syntax

Submission Deadline: 10-Nov-2026

Convenors:
Renáta Gregová (Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice)
Renáta Panocová (Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice)
Sylwia Gierszal (University of Silesia in Katowice)
Keywords: speech errors; speech production models; distinctive
features; cross-linguistic variation; data sources
Topic Description:
Speech errors, or slips of the tongue, are not random failures. As
Fromkin (1971, 1973, 1980) showed, they follow systematic patterns and
give direct evidence for the units that speakers use when they plan
speech. Errors can involve distinctive features, segments, syllables,
morphemes, words and phrases, and each type shows a different level of
planning. Fromkin (1971) proposed a model in which meaning, syntactic
structure, intonation, content words, affixes and function words, and
phonetic segments are specified in turn. Because errors at one level
can be compared with errors at others, they allow us to test whether
levels of planning are separate or interact. Later models, such as
Dell (1986), Levelt (1989) and Levelt et al. (1999), built on this
evidence. However, most of the data come from English and German, so
it is unclear how far these models apply to other languages. This
workshop asks what speech errors tell us at every linguistic level, in
different languages and from different sources of data.
We begin with the smallest units. Many models treat the phoneme as the
smallest unit of phonological encoding. Fromkin (1971), however,
described errors in which a single feature changes, for example
voicing in glear plue sky for clear blue sky. New evidence supports
the role of features. Gregová and Panocová (2026) examined 100
consonant errors from the Fromkin Speech Error Database. Nearly 50%
involve phonemes that differ by only one distinctive feature, and the
apparent independence of features depends on the theoretical framework
that is applied. Ongoing research on Slovak suggests that errors at
the level of distinctive features also occur in Slovak. If features
behave as units in both English and Slovak, this supports the view
that sub-phonemic structure is part of speech planning. If they do
not, the English result may depend on the data or on the analysis. In
either case, these results are a starting point, not the whole
picture.
The workshop then moves to other levels. Errors involving segments and
syllables show how sound sequences are planned, and their patterns
differ across languages: the syllable matters in Japanese (Kubozono,
1985), tone in Mandarin (Chen, 1999) and sub-lexical units in
Cantonese (Alderete, 2023). At the level of morphemes and words,
errors include affix and stem exchanges, blends and word
substitutions. In fusional languages such as Slovak, Czech and Polish,
one morpheme expresses several categories at once, so a morphological
slip can trigger changes in agreement (accommodation). In
agglutinative languages such as Finnish and Estonian, words are built
from chains of suffixes. Errors that involve whole words and phrases,
in turn, show how syntactic structure is built. Nooteboom (1969, 1980)
described how slips follow patterns and how speakers detect and
correct them. Dell and Reich (1981) used such data to identify stages
of sentence production, Meyer (1992) discussed what error analysis can
and cannot show, and Goldrick et al. (2011) asked how levels interact.
Different sources of data show different aspects of errors. Natural
collections of spontaneous errors remain central: the Fromkin Speech
Error Database (e.g., Gregová & Panocová, 2026), the Utrecht corpus
(Schelvis, 1985; Quené et al., 2024) and the Simon Fraser University
database (Alderete, 2024, 2025); Siew (2026) gives an overview. Errors
collected by listening are open to perceptual bias (Tent & Clark,
1980; Pérez et al., 2007; Bond, 2021). Recorded speech from broadcasts
and public speeches allows acoustic checks (El-Zawawy, 2021; Pasaribu
et al., 2026), although it may be scripted or edited. Experiments can
elicit errors under control, and errors in inner speech give further
evidence (Oppenheim & Dell, 2008). Errors can also be studied across
speaker groups, for example across the lifespan (Vousden & Maylor,
2006) and in naming tasks with language disorders (Cuetos et al.,
2000). Each source has strengths and limits, so conclusions are
strongest when several sources agree. Finally, interpreting is a
promising source: interpreters plan speech in one language while they
listen to another, so it shows how two languages interact in
production (Gierszal & Łyda, 2023).
Typologically, the workshop plans to compare the well-documented
Germanic data with less-studied languages: West Slavic (Slovak, Czech,
Polish), Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Estonian), Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian)
and North Germanic (Swedish, Norwegian), as well as languages outside
Europe. These languages differ from English in morphology, word order,
syllable structure and prosody, so they test claims that were made on
English data.
The workshop participants will attempt to answer the following
research questions:
1.      Units and levels. Which units (features, segments, syllables,
morphemes, words, phrases) do errors reveal in different languages,
and how do these levels interact?
2.      Distinctive features. How often do errors involve a change in
only one feature, in consonants and in vowels? Do features act
independently or interdependently, and does the answer depend on the
theory used?
3.      Syllables and prosody. How do syllable structure, stress and
tonal word accents constrain sound errors?
4.      Morphology and syntax. Where do errors occur in languages with
rich morphology: at the morpheme, the word or the phrase? How is
agreement adjusted after an error?
5.      Sources of data. What do spontaneous collections, corpora,
media speech, experiments and inner speech each show about errors, and
how can perceptual bias be controlled?
6.      Speakers and situations. Do interpreters, bilinguals,
children, older adults and speakers with language disorders make the
same types of errors as other speakers?
7.      Models. Which models of speech production best explain the
stages at which errors arise, and what must change to account for
typologically diverse languages?
Call for Abstracts:
We invite abstracts for the workshop Slips of the Tongue Across Levels
and Languages: From Distinctive Features to Syntax, to be held at the
60th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2027),
25-28 August 2027, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice.
We welcome empirical, experimental, corpus-based and theoretical
contributions on speech errors at any linguistic level (features,
segments, syllables, morphemes, words, phrases), especially on
less-studied languages, different data sources, and implications for
speech production models.
Abstracts (max. 100 words) should be sent to renata.gregova at upjs.sk,
renata.panocova at upjs.sk and sylwia.gierszal at us.edu.pl  by 10 November
2026.
References:
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Alderete, J. (2024). Simon Fraser University Speech Error Database
(SFUSED) Cantonese: Methods, design, and usage. Frontiers in
Psychology, 15, Article 1270433.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1270433
Alderete, J. (2025). Simon Fraser University Speech Error Database –
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Bond, Z. S. (2021). Slips of the ear. In The handbook of speech
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El-Zawawy, A. M. (2021). On-air slips of the tongue: A
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https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960400001838


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