Results presented in this paper strongly support the notion that similarities as well as differences in language systems can be empirically investigated by looking into the linguistic patterns of speech repairs in real speech data. A total of 500 Gemmn and 325 Mandarin Chinese overt immediate speech repairs were analysed with regard to their internal phrasal structures, with particular focus on the syntactic and morphological characteristics. Computational models in the form of finite state automata (FSA) also illustrate the describable regularity of German and Mandarin Chinese speech repairs in a formal way.