General overview of SpEDi:

Speech error and tip of the tongue diary for mobile devices

Diaries have long been used in Psycholinguistics to study language development and speech production. However, making such diaries can be challenging, in part, because speech errors tend to occur infrequently "in the wild." Often such collections are readily accessible only to the researcher investing the time and effort to maintain the diary, and, in some cases, those collections have been lost when the researcher retires. Finally, many diaries have focused on certain populations of language users, perhaps excluding individuals with certain speech-language-hearing disorders, or those who were not a native speaker of a particular language.

To address some of these issues, we created an on-line resource for the collection and dissemination of various types of speech errors that users witness or commit themselves. That is, we're attempting to "crowd-source" the difficult and time consuming task of collecting speech errors, and make the accumulated data more readily accessible to a larger number of language researchers. To facilitate the collection and dissemination of the errors we developed a web-based application, SpEDi, which can be accessed by any device (desktop or laptop computer, tablet, smartphone, etc.) that has a web-browser. Users can easily create (from the menu of their favorite web-browser) a bookmark or shortcut icon that can be placed on the home screen of their smartphone (or other device) to give the appearance of a native-application and to more quickly access the SpEDi to document a speech error. More information about how to use SpEDi can be found in this open-access journal article:

Vitevitch, M.S., Siew, C.S.Q., Castro, N., Goldstein, R., Gharst, J.A., Kumar, J.J., and Boos, E.B. (2015). Speech error and tip of the tongue diary for mobile devices. Frontiers in Psychology, 6:1190. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01190 

We hope that language enthusiasts, citizen scientists, students of the languages or language sciences, as well as researchers will contribute to the diary and obtain a better understanding of and appreciation for language research.