A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Speech Errors in Kiswahili

Abstract Due to the lack of cohesive data in linguistics revealing how the human brain functions, researchers make use of various disciplines including biology, neuroscience and psycholinguistics to investigate the relationship between language and the brain. Within the purview of psycholinguistics, this study presupposes optimality theory and Levelt’s theory of speech production, in order to analyse speech errors committed by non-brain damaged speakers of Kiswahili. These are mistakes made inadvertently during episodes of normal speech articulation. Speech errors are a natural and universal phenomenon across all human languages. Alongside the conventions constituting language games, speech errors can provide insightful evidence of intricate processes in the mental lexicon essential to speech production generally. It is noteworthy that the bulk of speech errors analysed in this study were premature cut-offs, since the speakers corrected their speech after their errors.