error (n.)

An application in LINGUISTICS of the general use of this term, referring to mistakes in spontaneous speaking or writing. Several types of psycholinguistic error have been recognized. ‘Speaker’s errors’, involving difficulties with the timing or sequence of commands, will lead to the addition, deletion or substitution of sounds and MORPHEMES – and are most noticeable in the phenomenon labelled ‘slips of the tongue’ (relabelled by some psycholinguists ‘slips of the brain’), and in the false starts, PAUSES, and other non-fluencies of everyday speech. ‘Hearer’s errors’ are particularly noticeable in language ACQUISITION, as when a child misanalyses an adult SENTENCE (e.g. A: He’s got his hat on. C: Where’s his hat on?), and in the history of language, where new forms have come from a reanalysis (or ‘metanalysis’) of older ones (e.g. a napron ⇒ an apron). The distinction between ‘errors’ of PRODUCTION and PERCEPTION is sometimes hard to draw, however – especially as often the only evidence for the latter is the former – and, generally, the term ‘error’ should be used with caution, especially in language acquisition studies, where it can be easily confused with the pedagogical notion of ‘error’ (in the context of essay-marking, etc.).

In language teaching and learning, error analysis is a technique for identifying, classifying and systematically interpreting the unacceptable forms produced by someone learning a foreign language, using any of the principles and procedures provided by LINGUISTICS. Errors are assumed to reflect, in a systematic way, the level of COMPETENCE achieved by a learner; they are contrasted with ‘mistakes’, which are PERFORMANCE limitations that a learner would be able to correct. A distinction is often drawn between errors which are noticed and corrected by the speaker, errors which the speaker can correct if prompted to do so, and errors which the speaker cannot correct because of a lack of linguistic knowledge.