Language Production Errors and Computer Usage Errors

In psycholinguistics, researchers study how people make errors in language production -- such errors may help probe the underlying cognitive / brain mechanisms for human language production.

As a large portion of my waking life is spent on the computer, I find that how people make errors in computer usage may also be an interesting research subject matter.

I do a lot of command-line typing on Linux. To find certain files containing a pattern of strings, the most commonly-used command is "grep"; in MySQL, to view certain records/entries satisfying some search conditions, the command (or query) is "select". The interesting thing is that in MySQL, I sometimes type (or almost type) "grep" -- I suppose that the cognitive mechanism underlying this type of errors may be similar to that underlying the "blends/substitution" errors in language production. (For various types of errors in language productions, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_error)