Subjects participated in either of three treatments of a task which elicits verbal slips. With equal chance probabilities of eliciting verbal slips related either to electricity or to sex, subjects receiving a situational cognitive set toward electric shocks made more electricity-type verbal slips than sex-type errors, while the opposite was true for a situational cognitive set toward sex, and no difference occurred for a neutral cognitive set. Results provide insight into psycholinguistic processing of both naturally occurring verbal slips and normal error-free speech.