Linguistic capture errors

Back in 2008, Arnold Zwicky described a category of typos that he called  "completion errors":

…a "completion error", a typo that results you start writing or typing a word and then drift part-way in to another word.  I do this all too often with -ation and -ating words — starting the verb COOPERATING but ending up with COOPERATION, for instance.  And several people have reported on the American Dialect Society mailing list that their intention to type LINGUISTS frequently leads them into LINGUISTICS, which then has to be truncated.  (This discussion on ADS-L followed my typing "original Broadway case", with CASE instead of CAST, and commenting on it.) 

26 years earlier, David Rumelhart and Donald Norman used the term "capture errors" for this phenomenon ("Simulating a skilled typist: A study of skilled cognitive-motor performance", Cognitive Science 1982:

This category of error occurs when one intends to type one sequence, but gets "captured" by another that has a similar beginning (Norman, 1981). Examples include:

efficiency – > efficient incredibly – > incredible normal – > norman

They further cite Donald Norman, "Categorization of action slips", Psychological review (1981), who wrote about "capture errors" of a more general type:

Capture slips. A capture error occurs when a familiar habit substitutes itself for the intended action sequence. The basic notion is simple: Pass too near a well-formed habit and it will capture your behavior. This set of errors can be described by concepts from the traditional psychological literature on learning—strong habits are easily provoked. […]

[C]apture errors have a certain flavor about them that set them off. Reason (1979) described them in this way:

Like the Siren's call, some motor programs possess the power to lure us into unwitting action, particularly when the central processor is occupied with some parallel mental activity. This power to divert action from some intention seems to be derived in part from how often and how recently the motor program is activated. The more frequently (and recently) a particular sequence of movements is set in train and achieves its desired outcome, the more likely it is to occur uninvited as a "slip of action."

The classic example of a capture error [is] the example from James of the person who went to his room to change for dinner and found himself in bed. Here are two more examples, one from my collection and one from Reason's:

I was using a copying machine, and I was counting the pages. I found myself counting "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King." (I have been playing cards recently.)

I meant to get my car out, but as I passed through the back porch on my way to the garage I stopped to put on my Wellington boots and gardening jacket as if to work in the garden. (Reason, 1979).

Rumelhart and Norman exclude these errors from their typing model: "There is no provision in the model for capture errors." And both earlier and later models of typing, as far as I can tell, either ignore these "capture errors" or similarly mention them without serious engagement, probably because they're much rarer than other sorts of typos.

But what I care about is something else. No doubt there are also "capture errors" in speech, though I don't think there's been an attempt to distinguish them systematically from other kinds of words substitutions. What's interesting — and apparently ignored by psycholinguists — is the striking difference that I noted in "Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue", 3/4/2018:

There's an interesting and understudied way that typing errors and speaking errors are different. From Gary Dell, "Speaking and Misspeaking", Ch. 7 in Introduction to Cognitive Science: Language, 1995:

One of the most striking facts about word slips, such as exchanges, anticipations, perseverations, and noncontextual substitutions, is that they obey a syntactic category rule. When one word erroneously replaces another, most of the time the target and substituting word are of the same syntactic category. Nouns slip with nouns, verbs with verbs, and so on.

In other words, we're NOT likely to say something like "When one word erroneously replacement another, …" or "exchanges, anticipation, perseverations, and noncontextual substituted […] obey a syntactic category rule".

But errors of this type are fairly common in typing. They seem to be cases where we've started to type the right thing, but as our attention shifts to the following material, our fingers follow a familiar but incorrect path.

I suspect that an explanation of this difference would tell us something important about speech production.

Some relevant past posts:

"A Cupertino of the mind", 5/22/2008 "What the fingers want", 7/30/2015 "Slips of the finger vs. slips of the tongue", 3/4/2018 "'Evil being protesting'", 6/27/2018

And in 2009, Stan Carey wrote about typing that for than ("A typo more mysterious that most"), and then catalogued many published examples ("Even stealthier than I thought", 5/5/2010).

What brought this all to mind was someone who commented on Nikola Jokić's role in Sunday's Denver/Minnesota NBA playoff game by writing:

He player 47 minutes tonight. He should have played like 41.

Again, this is a normal type of "capture error" in typing, but it would never happen in speech.

If I've missed some relevant research — which is likely — please let me know in the comments.