Free Psychology Article Critique Essay Sample
The article “Slips of the tongue” by Jena Pincott addresses the general public on the fear most people face when delivering speeches as a result of the Freudian slip. “Slips of the Tongue” provides throbbing panoply of comments that have derailed careers and soiled reputations.
The topic of this article is slips of the tongue. For instances, the article provides an example of the late senator, Ted Kennedy, who was a master orator. He was televised giving a speech, while often moving his hands when he spoke that day, and his voice intoned as his hands cupped the air to show the urgency that made pulse rate, he uttered some words wrong, but immediately he started again and uttered them correct. Another example in the article is that of Sigmund Freud. He revealed that an unconscious thought, wish, belief, or motive can lead to disturbance of speech. Freud also discovered a disturbing influence of something exterior on a person’s intended speech that only comes into light via the special slip-up. Thus, for instance, he notes a gaffe that Miss X made in regard to Mr. Y. Freud established that it was strange that thus woman spoke warmly of the man, when before she had expressed coldness or dislike. Freud then learned that the woman had an affair with Mr. Y. Thus, he concluded that Miss X intended to say cultivate but unconsciously she said captivate. And by saying captivate, the woman showed her hidden wish to become engaged to Mr. Y.
This article puts more emphasis on environment. This article depicts how environment impacts on a person’s utterance of words when delivering a speech. It is asserted that everything an individual does, thinks, or feels has significance and rationale, and that gestures, slips of the tongue, or mistakes have weight and nothing is accidental. These are seemingly innocent gaffes, which are in fact the outcome of unconscious area of the mind, a deep, out-of-the-way depository of urges or drives that are the major determinants of behavior, about which all individuals are unconscious. This implies that the slip of the tongue is a result of what an individual has nurtured in his mind over a period of time or for a short period of time, and it comes out through the same individual’s unconscious part of the mind when one is talking or delivering a speech. On the other hand, to slow a communication is equally disastrous. The words, ideas or thoughts should not be so far apart that a regiment of infantry could fit between them. It is significant to let the rate of communication be adapted to the capacity of reception. The slip known as anticipation occurs as a result of forward error attributed to occasional nodes for sound that takes place afterward in a sentence, which are activated in advance; and later the sound is substituted for the correct ones.
The author of this article seems to employ cognitive theoretical perspective. This theoretical perspective explains how people use language or words incorrectly. Often this errors result from intrusions by other thoughts or by stimuli in the environment. One way in which people use language incorrectly is through slips of the tongue, which are inadvertent linguistic errors in what an individual says. Cognitive theoretical perspective is intrigued to slips of the tongue; the lack of correspondence between what is thought and what is said may tell people how language is produced. Sometimes, however, this plan is disrupted when an individual’s mechanism for speech production does not cooperate with the cognitive one.
This article relies on the expert opinions of various psychologists such as Freud and others. The article concludes that slips of the tongue may be taken to indicate that the language of thought differs somewhat from the language through which people express their thoughts; often they have the idea right, but its expression comes out wrong. Sometimes individuals are not even aware of the slip until it is pointed out to them. In the language of mind, whatever it may be, the idea is right, although the expression represented by the slip is inadvertently wrong. This fact can be seen in the occasional slip of the tongue even in preplanned and practical speech. This implies that slip of the tongue is inevitable. This conclusion is a valid one.
The article also covers how people tend to make various kinds of slips in their own conversations and when delivering a speech. Thus, in anticipation, the speaker uses a language element before it is appropriate in the sentence because it corresponds to an element that will be needed later in the utterance. In perseveration, the speaker uses a language element that was appropriate earlier in the sentence but that is not appropriate later on. In substitution, an individual uses one language element for another; and in reversal, the individual switches the positions of two language elements. This helps one to improve his knowledge and understanding of behavior of individuals.
In conclusion, most everyday slips of the tongue, however, are not as entertaining. They are often basically the outcome of a sound being passed over from one word to the next or a sound used in one word in expectation of its happening in the next word. The article shows that slips of the tongue are never random, that they never produce a phonological unacceptable sequence, and that they point out the survival of diverse stages in the articulation of expressions. The slips of the tongue are mostly treated as errors of articulation; they may result from slips of the brain as it tries to organize the message to be delivered out. The article also covers the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is not directly observable and can only be studied by inference from behavior under certain conditions. This helps in improving one’s knowledge on cognitive psychology.