EXPLORATORY EXPERIMENTS ABOUT THE CONNECT ION BETWEEN SLIPS OF THE TONGUE AND WORKING-MEMORY

This article is based on the conjecture that a relation exists between the phonological loop, part of the working memory (Baddeley, 1997), a nd speech production. The influence of verbal material stored in the p honological loop on the frequency of slips during articulation was stu died experimentally. The SLIP tec technique of inducing speech errors was used (Baars, 1992). Pairs of words are presented successively to t he subjects, for one second each. Some of the word pairs are to be spo ken aloud. The articulation of these words can be influenced by preced ing phonologically interfering words in such a way that the probabilit y of exchanging the first phonemes of both words is increased (spooner isms). In both exploratory experiments we performed the time interval between the phonologically interfering information and the pairs of wo rds which had to be spoken aloud was systematically manipulated. Accor ding to Baddeley's theory of working memory (1997) it was expected tha t phonological interference should be restricted to a time interval of about two seconds. This expectation was supported empirically.