Self-monitoring for speech errors in novel phrases and phrasal lexical items

The preparation and production of phrasal lexical items (PLIs), e.g. proverbs, sayings, idiomatic expressions, collocations, clichés etc. is hypothesized to be more automatic than the preparation and production of novel phrases. Automatic processes are known to be less error prone and for that reason also less closely monitored for errors than are novel processes. Therefore it is predicted that speech errors occurring during the production of phrasal lexical items, although less frequent, will be less often detected and repaired than speech errors arising during the production of novel phrases. This prediction is tested against a corpus of speech errors and their repairs in spontaneous Dutch. Phrases containing speech errors with or without repairs were changed back into their intended equivalents, and the resulting phrases were subjectively classified as PLIs or novel phrases by three non-naive linguistic experts. The classification was checked against frequency of usage of these phrases, on the presumption that PLIs will, in general, be more frequent in corpora than novel phrases. The repair rate of speech errors was found to be significantly lower in PLIs than in novel phrases.