General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This Teacher's Alarming Resignation Letter Shows How Much Schools Have Changed Since You Were A Kid [View all]Igel
(35,191 posts)Having done hundreds of hours of transcriptions and having listened to recordings of myself, I can easily say that speech errors abound. The more you have to think, the slower you speak, the more complex your sentence, the richer your lexicon, the more likely it is that you'll err in number agreement, in tense agreement, etc.
Once had a boss stupidly tell me to not change anything. He had said things exactly as he had intended, and wanted an absolutely faithful transcription of every syllable. He got what he asked for. Every "uh," "um," "you know" was carefully included. Every place where he began with a singular and ended with a plural, started with a past tense and ended in the present, every place where he lost his train of thought and spliced sentences together or failed to use the subjunctive properly was, to him, a glaring act of sabotage, an instance of calumny hurled at his polished speaking style. So I had him read the transcript as he listened to the recording. Nearly got myself fired but I learned my mistake: Always correct the speaker's mistakes.
That said, dysfluencies are valuable in providing not only insight into how language works, but the thinking of the person involved. And last I heard, there was a decent bit of evidence that some dysfluencies also served a communicative purpose: A speaker unconsciously alters the type and rate of dysfluencies as the audience changes its characteristics.