Current Research on Language Learning and Teaching : Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Slips of the tongue are almost inevitable. It is proven that for every thousand words spoken, people make one or two errors, which means that a slip is bound to occur about once every seven minutes of continuous talk. The average person makes between 7 and 22 verbal slips every day. This paper aims to analyse both linguistic and psychoanalytic aspects of slips of the tongue, as well as describe their prevalence in the Bosnian language. Freud insisted that slips of the tongue represent repressed thoughts or motives, while his contemporary, philologist Rudolf Meringer, said that they are just accidental shifts of linguistic units. By contrast, cognitive scientist Gary Dell contends that slips of the tongue reveal a person's capacity for using language and its components. In order to analyse the most prevalent slips of the tongue that usually occur within a group of native speakers of Bosnian, a random sample of 100 Bosnians (50 males and 50 females, aged 25–55) filled in a questionnaire designed to identify their awareness of the number of slips in their everyday speech, as well as their willingness to describe them as either repressed thoughts or motives or accidental shifts. It is concluded that people are less likely to adhere to Freudian principles of unconscious motives than the description of slips as ordinary errors. The results are further described in the context of Dell's idea of spreading activation according to which language is error prone, which allows for the novel production of words, and is prima facie evidence of linguistic flexibility and proof of the great dexterity of the human mind.