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You are already preparing your next words while speaking.
A 1986 study showed that speech errors occur because we process phonemes for future words before finishing current ones.
Anticipatory errors, or spoonerisms, demonstrate that the brain runs parallel planning cycles during speech. When the activation of a future sound is stronger than the present one, the future sound leaks into the current utterance.
Your mind lives slightly in the future, even in casual conversation.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Gary Dell, 1986, Psychological Review
- What the check found
- Gary Dell's 1986 Psychological Review paper is the seminal work on spreading-activation theory in speech production, which explains anticipatory errors as an inherent byproduct of the retrieval process.
- Confidence
- Well replicated
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.