Is there a term for unconsciously using a wrong word when speaking because you were otherwise looking at, listening to, or thinking about that word?

As a contrived example, you might be looking at the book "1984" when someone ask you when you were born, so you answer "1984" by mistake. You do, of course, know when you were born. You just had a little neurolinguistic slip. So, is there a word that perfectly describes that situation — or perhaps the word? It is not a "malapropism" or any such failure to know what is correct; it is just an ephemeral "slip" of the brain.

Solution 1:

In psycholinguistics, this is a type of priming, defined in Insights from Psycholinguistics as "the phenomenon in which prior exposure to specific language forms or meanings influences a speaker’s subsequent language comprehension or production."

We're often primed by semantically related words rather than the word itself. Like if you saw the words "collar," "leash," and "walk," and someone asked you to name an animal, you'd probably be more likely to say "dog" than "cat." But that might also happen if you were just looking at the word "dog," too - it's just a more direct form of priming.

So in linguistic terms, the phenomenon you're describing is a speech error conditioned by priming.