I remember a fascinating (and fun) section in one of my Psychology courses in University. It was about language, specifically reading (that’s why I’m certain it was in my Psychology of Language course) where we learned about errors in word recognition. Some of the errors we learned included the alteration of the first letter of a word. For example reading Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos as Tales of the Mthulhu Cythos. I remember there being about four different ways that such a thing can occur, including moving a letter forward to another word, moving a letter backward, and switching a word. I strongly remember one of these using the term perseveration although the term perseveration clearly is incorrect since it means something completely different. I am fairly certain that it started with a “P” and had something like “serv” in it.
Does anyone know what I am thinking of?
Nevermind, by refining my search parameters, I found it (about two minutes after posting this) in my Psychology of Language textbook–as expected. It turns out I was right after all, it is perseveration! The types of word-recognition errors are
Technically, perseveration is just one form of metathesis, and Spoonerisms are more specific to what I was thinking.[1]