Taeho Kim. & Han-gyu Lee, 2020. Journal of Cross-cultural Studies xx-xx. A Linguistic Analysis of Children's Speech Errors in Korean Speech Production. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how Korean children produce speech errors (or slips of the tongue) during speech production and show that their errors are not arbitrary but systematic, which reflects their language knowledge and abilities. To achieve this goal, we collected 122 speech errors from the spontaneous, casual conversations of two groups of children, pre-schoolers and primary schoolers, and classified them according to three dimensions: linguistic components, directionality, and forms of errors. The rates of errors were compared carefully, not only between the two child groups, but also between children and adults. Such comparisons provide a linguistic clue for language production and language development processes. This study will be linguistically significant in that there have been no studies of children’s speech errors in Korean, although there have been many in other languages.

language development, children’s speech errors, language acquisition, Korean speech production