ABSTRACT
The above slip of the tongue is taken from Freud's classic work The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and in the above instance the woman has mistakenly used the German word Marder (murderer) instead of the intended word Marser (mortars). Freud believed that speech errors provided an important window on people's unconscious motivation. This mayor may not be true, but what is certain is that the analysis of speech errors has played an important role in trying to understand the nature of speech production. Errors produced by normal people have, for example, shed considerable light on the nature of sentence production (e.g. Levelt, 1993). However, in developing models that deal with more fundamental aspects of language, data from brain damaged subjects has been of prime importance.
