Yang, W. (2002). Communication slips and their sociocultural implications. Language & Communication. 22(1), 69-82. Retrieved from ScienceDirect on 4 April 2008.
This paper is a sort of bridge between some of the concepts we learned in Erard's Um and Agar's Language Shock. Yang acknowledges the usefulness of studying speech disfluencies from a linguistic and psychological perspective, but proposes that sociocultural aspects also play a role. To use Agar's terminology, different Languacultures are going to produce different errors for different reasons.
Yang explains that familal relationships are more central and specific in Chinese as opposed to English. Cousins in Traditional Chinese are distuinguished by gender, age in relation to the speaker, and "closeness," (whether or not the cousin is related to the father). Because there are more options to choose from in Chinese, there are more chances for error than in English. Yang also points out that in English, once a relationship becomes too complicated to describe succintly, English speakers tend to just describe others by name, rather than kinship term, reducing the chance of speech errors here even further. For example, rather than introduce you to "my ex's parents who I'm still very close to," I'll introduce you to Jim and Phyllis. This is considered impolite in Chinese languaculture.
Another interesting sociocultural aspect of slips that Yang describes is that as speakers (regardless of the languaculture), we're aware that speech errors happen. She describes to purposeful plays on this theme. One is that some may mask potentially offensive political statements under the guise of slips, which she holds as a possible explanation for Dick Armey's referring to Barney Franks as Barney Fag. Another purposeful use of slips is in a traditional Chinese performance called "cross-talk" (xiangsheng). In this performance, Speaker A sets up Speaker B to make a slip. It can be compared to the priming trick in English where Speaker A tells Speaker B to repeat "poke" 10 times and then asks what the white of an egg is called.