Did I Really Just Say That?

Did I Really Say That?

Your slips of the tongue may not be Freudian, but that doesn’t make them meaningless.

By Devon Frye

Each of us speaks, on average, thousands of words per day. For the most part, we handle this immense verbal volume with aplomb. When the inevitable error arises—trying to tell a friend about Prague’s nightlife, say, yet accidentally talking about the city’s “light knife” instead—it can be amusing, frustrating, even embarrassing. But does it actually mean anything?

Sigmund Freud certainly thought so. In the famed psychoanalyst’s 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, he argued that the seemingly inconsequential verbal errors we make each day in fact reveal the secret beliefs and desires, often sexual, of our unconscious mind. Today, many people continue to believe that their slips of the tongue threaten to unmask their repressed natures or deepest, darkest thoughts, and the term Freudian slip remains part of our vernacular, even as many of Freud’s other ideas have been debunked.

But more recent research on speech production suggests a different, less titillating, explanation. “Slips happen because we have to retrieve words very quickly—two or three a second—and get all their sounds correct,” says psycholinguist Gary Dell, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This process occurs via the “spreading of activation” of different nodes in your brain, he explains. “When you’re trying to retrieve cat, both similar-meaning words, like dog, and similar sounding words, like cap, are activated.” Choosing incorrectly from the several options presented to us leads to a slip.

Sounds, too, collide with others during this rapid-fire process; someone might ask for a “cuff of coffee” because their brain was forecasting the rest of the sentence (“of coffee”) and activated the f sound too early. Certain situations—talking quickly or being unfamiliar with the topic of discussion—tend to make slips more likely.

Our slips also tend to adhere to certain rules, Dell says. Even if you mix up or omit sounds, you’re still more likely to say a real word than a nonword. What’s more, words you accidentally utter may indeed be words that were already on your mind. In one experiment, participants who had read the phrase “damp rifle” were more likely to later say “wet gun” instead of “get one.” “Freud was right that slips express meaning and thoughts,” Dell notes. “There’s no evidence, though, that repressed thoughts are more likely to be expressed.”

The vast majority of the errors we make each day pass by unnoticed. Certain mistakes, though, can seem to take on outsize psychological importance—either because the misspoken words appear significant in some way or because of where and when they occur.

Slips of omission can appear especially damning, argues retired therapist Leon Seltzer—for example, a client in couples counseling who accidentally tells his partner that he is attracted to his colleague when he meant to say he isn’t. The sound n’t may have been omitted because he is trying very hard not to say the “wrong” thing and stumbles—or because he is in fact making a concerted effort to hide the truth. “Freud could certainly be hyperbolic,” Seltzer says. “But I think he was right in concluding that what we’re thinking, yet not actually wanting to say, can at times be so close to the surface that it gets involuntarily expressed.”

Slips, whether frustrating or revealing, can also simply be a testament to the power of human language, Dell argues. We’re more likely to slip by saying an established word, but at their most serendipitous, slips can sometimes actually help us create and understand new words, allowing us to move beyond fixed sets of expressions and communicate in ways that no other animals can. “We form new combinations of words with just about everything we say,” he explains. “Slips of the tongue are the unintended novelties that arise from this fundamentally good aspect of language.”

The Power of Pronouns

Some everyday unconscious word choices can reveal a great deal about the state of our lives.

By Valerie Fridland

What if some of the most common words people use every day, without much conscious thought, could actually clue us in to their degree of marital satisfaction or potential for leadership—or, even more important, be used to track their level of depression or suicide risk? Turns out, an impressive array of research suggests we could, in fact, derive all of that from the patterns of people’s pronouns.

From Me to We

When we’re in a romantic relationship, the partnering power of we reflects more than just our nonsingle status; it is also a good indicator of marital health. Studies have shown that partners who use more first-person plural pronouns like we or us report greater marital satisfaction than those who use the singular I or you more often. This is not so surprising if we think of we as reflecting a view of ourselves as part of a team. This collective perspective also appears to help couples in times of difficulty or conflict: Other research has found that using plural pronouns also indicates higher-quality interactions and more positive problem-solving. But when a relationship ends, shifting back to a more self-focused I or me may show that one or both partners have adapted to the breakup.

While most people probably associate Rudy Giuliani with politics and not pronouns, researchers James Pennebaker and Thomas Lay of the University of Texas found that he started using more I pronouns at press conferences after going through a painful and public divorce, suggesting his processing of a newly single identity. In a different study, people who were still using we to talk about themselves and their ex after a breakup were found to be less adjusted to their split than those who used the more othering he or she.

The Ultimate Power Word

Psychologists and linguists have found that pronoun patterns also reveal a lot about power and status in other facets of our lives. In a study asking people to solve a task in which one member of a group was arbitrarily assigned as a leader, researchers found that this “leader” used more other-focused pronouns (like you or she) while “lower-status” participants used more self-focused pronouns like I. Considered with other research examining the pronoun patterns of those in more powerful positions, a pattern emerges: Leaders use fewer first-person singular words and more plural words—we, our, they—while subordinates lean on I.

This may at first be surprising, as I might seem like the ultimate power word—as in “I expect” or “I need.” But as anyone trying to effectively parent or supervise has learned, telling someone what they need to do by couching it in terms of what you want rarely works. Instead, those in higher-status positions may need to focus more on the actions of others while those lower in rank focus on their own role.

The idea that leaders should use more other-focused pronouns might be why, when those in powerful positions do use a lot of I pronouns, they are sometimes accused of narcissism. But studies have failed to turn up a consistent association between high levels of I-talk and narcissism.

Self-focus, as it happens, is not the same thing as self-importance: We all appear to shift toward I pronouns when self-focus makes sense, as when we are talking about our own work product or activities, or when facing life stressors—i.e., after a breakup or other traumatic event. It is only when self-focus becomes extreme or overly intense that the amount of I-talk may point to a more serious mental health issue.

When “I” Should Worry

A multitude of studies in both clinical and nonclinical settings have revealed that depressed individuals routinely use more I pronouns than others. In letters written by college students who were clinically depressed, there were more I pronouns than in letters by other students, and poets who later committed suicide were found to use higher rates of I pronouns than those who did not.

If high use of singular pronouns can be proven to serve as a signal of severe emotional distress, then changes in an individual’s rates and types of pronoun use over time might be valuable for the clinicians who monitor and assess them. It also opens up the possibility that providing patients with opportunities to switch perspectives between self- and other-focused pronouns might provide some positive benefit.

Though research is limited on the question of whether consciously changing one’s pronoun usage might itself improve mental state, in at least one study, shifting focus away from oneself in a diary-writing exercise—narrating the same event by first using the first person (I, me), then shifting to the second (you), and finally to the third (she, they)—provided therapeutic benefit.

People’s pronoun choice offers a unique opportunity to determine how they see themselves within the stories they tell and provides a surprising window into their psychological, emotional, and social states. These few simple everyday words turn out to be exceptionally revealing.

Valerie Fridland, Ph.D., is a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English.

How to ID Deceptive Speech

Even the most committed deceivers leave critical clues in their speech for those who know what to listen for.

By Jack Schafer

Truth can be elusive, and liars often get away with delivering their version of reality to audiences untrained in detecting deception. But many would-be deceivers unconsciously expose themselves through their speech in ways that alert listeners can learn to detect. Certain core maxims tend to guide our conversations, and when they are broken, it should raise a red flag. For example, we know that tone should match content, and so people’s nonverbal expressions should be congruent with their words. Someone reporting bad news with a smile, or vice versa, may be engaged in deception, or at least withholding. Following are some other potential signs of deception:

Using the personal identifier I signals truthfulness; it indicates that a person is committed to what they are saying. Liars, however, often struggle at some level to commit to false information, so they unintentionally omit I when they speak. Often, liars will mix truthful statements with deceptions, leading to the presence of I in honest declarations and its omission in falsehoods.

Imagine parents asking their son where he was the night before and getting this response: “I drove to John’s house. Went to the park and played basketball. Went to the convenience store and bought a drink. I drove John home. I drove home after that.” The son’s use of I in the first sentence indicates he is committed to this part of the story. In the next two sentences, though, he omits the personal pronoun, indicating less commitment. These are the areas of his response where he may not be being truthful.

When deception is suspected, each sentence a person speaks should be examined for the use of the first person in simple past tense and, perhaps more importantly, its absence. When we tell the truth, we retrieve information from our memories. To deceive, we need to either make up “facts” or modify our memories. Deceivers often mentally rehearse their lies in the present tense. Once sat­isfied that a fabricated story is plausible, they must translate it into the past tense to simulate a truthful narrative, but they often fail to do so completely, leading to unintentional use of the present tense, with the information delivered in the present tense potentially cluing an attentive listener to deception. (An exception is that when people recount traumatic events, they often use the present tense because they are reliving events in their mind as they tell the story.)

Liars also use stopped-action words to give the illusion that they completed an action or activity when, in fact, it may not have been finished—or even begun. Common examples include started, began, continued, resumed, asked, tried, and contin­ued. In the sentence, “I started to put my turn signal on,” the speaker uses the stopped-action word started to give the impression that he turned the signal on when, in fact, he did not; if he had, he would have just said, “I turned my signal on.” A stopped-action word accompanied by a reason for the interruption indicates truth­fulness; when it lacks a reason, it should raise suspicion. The use of try in particular suggests the speaker is not serious about a task; try provides a built-in escape hatch.

Liars typically tell the truth up until the point when they want to withhold something. They then skip over that potentially incriminating information and resume telling the truth. In this manner, they only provide facts that can be verified. Withholding, though, creates gaps in their speech that must be addressed with verbal bridges, the most common of which were identified by my research as then, so, after, when, as, while, and next. These bridges identify where liars are withholding information, so identifying them provides specific areas for additional inquiry.

A student suspected of taking $20 from a teacher’s office during a break in classes, for example, was asked to produce a statement about her activities at the time. She wrote: “I arrived at 7:45 a.m. with Jenna. I came into the room, put my bag at my desk, and Jenna and I went to the snack area to get some coffee. I returned to the classroom and sat at my desk. At 8:50 we went on a break. Jenna and I went to the bathroom. After that I came back to the classroom, and Jenna stayed in the bathroom. She came back to the classroom soon. We sat at our desk and waited for our class to continue.” The use of the text bridge after creates an information gap between the time she went to the bathroom and the time she came back to the classroom—sufficient time to steal the $20, which, after a more detailed follow-up interview, the student admitted to doing.

Jack Schafer, Ph.D., is a behavioral analyst for the FBI and the author of The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over.

Well, um, You Know, You’re Saying More Than You Think

We may not like to hear placeholder words, but we get more information from them than we realize.

By Hans Rutger Bosker

Spontaneous speech is messy. We stumble over words, lose our line of thought midsentence, slow down to buy time to find that word we are looking for, and produce tons of so-called placeholder words, like um, well, and you know. Together, these are known as “disfluencies,” and even though there is some evidence that higher disfluency rates correlate with lower verbal intelligence, we all do it.

When you ask people to judge others by their speech, a trend emerges: Listeners dislike disfluency. Slow talkers producing loads of ums and pauses are generally perceived as less charismatic and less intelligible. This has been found in correlational studies, comparing natural speech from different talkers, but also in confirmatory experiments. Work from our own lab showed that the same clip of a speaker may receive different scores from listeners depending on how many pauses are artificially inserted or how much the speech is slowed down. (These effects go beyond acoustic “indicators”: The absence of natural hand gestures, for example, can make a speaker “sound” more accented.)

Observed in ratings of speakers’ various personal traits, these effects have real-life consequences. Slow down the speech of a male talker and studies show that he’s less likely to be successful in drawing female romantic interest. Job applicants who produce many disfluencies are less likely to be hired. Listeners also draw on um as a lie detector: When two people play a competitive game, and one tells the other that “the treasure is behind the, um, castle,” the other player is more likely to look behind the princess.

To avoid such reactions, audio editors routinely cut disfluencies out of radio interviews and podcasts (known as “de-um-ing”) and public speakers strive to avoid placeholders. In all of the recorded inaugural speeches by U.S. presidents between 1940 and 1996, there is not a single uh or um. But science tells us there may be even more to disfluencies.

Pauses and Predictions

Disfluencies do not occur in random positions in sentences. Ums typically occur right before more difficult or low-frequency words (“um…carburetor”). Because most people, over the course of their lives, have had plenty of experience with this nonarbitrary distribution of disfluencies, they actually use this implicit knowledge when listening to disfluent speech—that is, they use ums to predict what word will follow next.

Imagine you’re having dinner with a friend at a restaurant, and there are four items on the table: a knife, a glass, a napkin, and a wine decanter. Your friend turns to you and says: “Could you hand me the...um...” What would you assume they want? Since it’s unlikely they would hesitate before such common words as knife, glass, or napkin, chances are you’ll look at the decanter, pick it up, and ask, “You mean this?”

This is exactly what we demonstrated through controlled eye-tracking studies in our lab. When participants are presented with four objects on a screen and hear spoken instructions to “Click on the... um...,” they tend to look at the lowest-frequency objects. Apparently, listeners hear the um and predict that an uncommon word is most likely to follow next.

Such predictions, though, reflect more than just simple association between disfluencies and difficult words; listeners are actively taking the perspective of the speaker. For example, we showed that when you hear a non-native speaker say the same sentence as above but with a thick foreign accent—“Cleek on thee...eeh...”—listeners do not show a preference for looking at low-frequency objects. Presumably, this is because listeners assume non-native speakers may have as much trouble coming up with the English word for a common object, like a knife, as for more unusual ones; as such, their disfluencies are less predictive.

In another experiment, listeners were presented with an atypical speaker who consistently produced disfluencies before simple words (“um....knife”) and never before difficult words. Initially, participants displayed the natural predictive strategy: looking at uncommon objects upon hearing um. However, as more time went by, and they gained experience with this atypical distribution of disfluencies, listeners started to demonstrate the reverse predictive behavior: They tended to look at simple objects when hearing the talker say um. That is, they learned to adjust their natural predictions to the disfluency behavior of the talker at hand.

These findings represent further evidence that the human brain is a prediction machine: We continuously try to anticipate what will happen next. In spoken communication, we draw upon prior experience to try to predict what word will follow and adjust these predictions on a talker-by-talker basis: What may be distracting and unexpected for one talker may be conventional and expected for another. Not all disfluencies are created equal.

Hans Rutger Bosker, Ph.D., leads the Speech Perception in Audiovisual Communication (SPEAC) research group at Radboud University, The Netherlands.

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