A psycholinguistic research on slips of the tongue occurred in the speaking class of English Letters and Language Department students of UIN Malang

As a social person, human beings are always interrelated with others. Here, the function of language is very important thing to be used by people in the world to communicate with each other. Talking about speech, it is realized that there is relationship between speech and slips of the tongue because slips of the tongue is one of the types of speech errors. Meanwhile, as human beings, every one of us seems to produce slips of the tongue and therefore it is interesting to be researched.

Fromklin (in Clark, 1977:273) said that slips of the tongue is said to have occurred when the speaker’s actual utterance differs in some way from the intended utterance. It involves unintentional movement, addition, deletion, blending, or substitution of material within an utterance and can be phonological, morphological, lexical or syntactic. It is not the product of intentional ungrammaticality, ignorance, language play, or motor dysfluencies.

Slips of the tongue has 8 types, they are: anticipations, perseverations, reversals/ exchanges, blends, shifts/misderivations, substitutions, additions and deletions. However, this research used qualitative design as it’s method of analyzing and collecting the data.

To get the original and valid data, the researcher used the following steps: Firstly, the researcher followed the speaking class of English Letters and Language Department Students of UIN Malang and observes every word uttered by the students. Secondly, while observing, he also recorded all utterances that were spoken by the students. Taking note was also done to record context of utterances. Thirdly, the researcher transcribed every word or sentence uttered by the students. Fourthly, the researcher selected the utterances that are related to the types of slips of the tongue. Finally, the researcher arranged the data which are appropriate with the problem of the research.

Based on the analysis, this research only found 6 types from 8 types of slips of the tongue, they are: reversals/exchanges, blends, shifts/misderivations, substitutions, additions and deletions. Anticipations and perseverations were not found. Most of case of slips of the tongue found in this research is shifts/ misderivations (11 data), followed by additions (8 data), substitutions (5 data), deletions (3 data), reversals/exchanges (2 data) and blends (1 data).

For the English Department students, this research may give benefit especially on the application of psycholinguistics study. At last, the researcher suggests the next researcher who will do the research in the same field of study to analyze different forms using different theory, so that the result of the research would be comparable.