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736 Speech Development neurocognition: speech and face processing in the first year of life. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. 259–274. Lindblom B (1992). ‘Phonological units as adaptive emergents in lexical development.’ In Ferguson et al. (eds.). 131–163. Locke J (1983). Phonological acquisition and change. Academic Press: New York. MacNeilage P F & Davis B (1990). ‘Acquisition of speech production: the achievement of segmental independence.’ In Hardcastle W & Marchal A (eds.) Speech production and speech modelling. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. 55–68. MacNeilage P F, Davis B L & Matyear C L (1997). ‘Babbling and first words: phonetics similarities and differences.’ Speech Communication 22, 269–277. MacNeilage P F, Davis B L, Kinney A & Matyear C L (2000). ‘The motor core of speech: a comparison of serial organization patterns in infants and languages.’ Child Development 71, 153–163. Nittrouer S (1996). ‘Discriminability and perceptual weighting of some acoustic cues to speech perception by 3-year-olds.’ Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 39, 278–297. Nittrouer S, Studdert-Kennedy M & McGowan R S (1989). ‘The emergence of phonetic segments: evidence from the spectral structure of fricative-vowel syllables spoken by children and adults.’ Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 32, 120–132.

Oller D (1980). ‘The emergence of speech sounds in infancy.’ In Yeni-Komshian et al. (eds.). 93–112. Snow D (2004). ‘Falling intonation in the one- and twosyllable utterances of infants and preschoolers.’ Journal of Phonetics 32, 373–393. Snow D & Ballog H L (2002). ‘Do children produce melody before the words? A review of developmental intonation research.’ Lingua 112, 1025–1058. Stark R E (1980). ‘Stages of speech development in the first year of life.’ In Yeni-Komshian et al. (eds.). 73–92. Stoel-Gammon C & Dunn J (1985). Normal and disordered phonology in children. Baltimore: University Park Press. Studdert-Kennedy M (1987). ‘The phoneme as a perceptuomotor structure.’ In Allport A, MacKay D, Prinz W & Sweerer E (eds.) Language perception and production. New York: Academic Press. 67–84. Sussman H M, Hoemeke K & McCaffrey H A (1992). ‘Locus equations as an index of coarticulation distinctions in children.’ Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 35, 769–781. Vihman M M (1996). Phonological development: the origins of language in the child. Oxford: Blackwell. Yavas M (1998). Phonology: development and disorders. London: Singular. Yeni-Komshian G H, Kavanagh J F & Ferguson C A (eds.) (1980). Child phonology I: production. New York: Academic Press.

Speech Errors as Evidence in Phonology S A Frisch, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Speech error data have been used to argue for the psychological reality of many linguistic constituents (Fromkin, 1971; Stemberger, 1983; Dell, 1995). The most commonly occurring errors involve the units of phoneme, word, and morpheme. Speech errors also usually involve the interaction of two constituents in the utterance. For example, segmental errors frequently involve the confusion of onset segments between words (e.g., /sE&IN/ for ‘getting’ in ‘getting such bad luck’). Interactions between constituents almost always involve two constituents of the same type (e.g., noun, syllable onset). Phonological speech error data focus on errors involving phonological constituents (e.g., segments, features) and prosodic positions (e.g., onset, nucleus, stress). Speech error data are commonly collected in one of two ways. Spontaneous or naturally occurring speech errors are collected in normal communicative

situations, such as everyday conversations or radio broadcasts. Experimentally elicited speech errors are collected under laboratory conditions and usually focus on creating segmental errors. There are two common procedures for eliciting segmental speech errors: the SLIPS technique and tongue twisters (see Baars et al., 1975; Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1992). The SLIPS technique uses phonological priming to increase error rates (from <1% in normal speech to 5–10% in SLIPS). In the SLIPS procedure, a participant sees a series of word pairs containing the phonological contrasts of interest (e.g., /t/ and /k/ in tap cab, top cap, tall cave) and then sees a word pair that reverses the contrast (e.g., call take) and is cued to produce the reversal pair. Phonological tongue twisters also create speech errors at above normal rates (2–10%). Phonological tongue twisters typically use a four-word sequence that alternates a target contrast (e.g., top cap cop tab).

Speech Errors as Evidence for Phonological Structure Both naturally occurring errors and experimentally elicited errors provide evidence for the prosodic

Speech Errors as Evidence in Phonology 737

structures of phonological representation proposed by phonologists. Evidence for the influence of phonological features on speech errors comes from the fact that errors between segments that are similar (and thus share many phonological features) are more common than errors between segments that share fewer phonological features (van den Broeke and Goldstein, 1980). Evidence for features can also be found, though rarely, in speech errors that appear to involve the rearrangement of individual phonological features. Fromkin (1971) presents the error /glir plu/ for ‘clear blue’ as an error involving [voice] only. Analogous errors occur that involve the rearrangement of a single segment, syllable onset, syllable rime, and whole syllable (Fromkin, 1971). For example, the error /frIs gAto/ for ‘fish grotto’ involves the misproduction of a single segment constituent, distinct from the syllable onset constituent. Complex syllable onsets can also act as a unit in speech errors, as in /ske pel/ for ‘pay scale.’ Among naturally occurring phonological errors, where the probabilities of different error types have been examined, the most common errors involve a single phoneme. Errors involving whole syllables or subsyllabic constituents are less common.

syllable onset in English, are rarely violated in elicited speech errors. Errors that changed the prosodic position within the syllable of other segments occurred much more frequently. (For example, /f/ or /s/, which can be either an onset or a coda in English, changed from onset to coda in an error much more frequently than /h/. In addition to true phonotactic constraints from English, Dell et al. (2000) also examined artificial phonotactic constraints that existed only within the context of the experiment (e.g., /s/ only ever appears as an onset in the words used in the experiment). Dell et al. (2000) found that in these experiments, the experiment specific, artificial phonotactic constraints were also infrequently violated. Since errors in general usually preserve the within-syllable position of the error segment, Dell et al. (2000) hypothesize that the mechanisms that maintain syllable position in speech errors are the same mechanisms that prevent errors that create phonotactically illegal sequences. Since phonotactic constraints are always present in the use of language, they have a strong effect on speech error outcomes. Less robust phonotactic generalizations, like ones within a set of experiment stimuli or within a single stimulus item (such as ‘/s/ is a syllable onset in this word’), have a weaker effect on speech error outcomes.

Speech Errors as Evidence for Phonological Constraints

Cross-Linguistic Speech Errors

Interactions between segments in speech errors largely happen between segments in identical position within the word, syllable, and prosodic structure. For example, Shattuck-Hufnagel (1992) found that errors were most likely between segments that shared word onset position and stress. She used tongue twisters that were specially constructed to vary stress and position in the word between similar segments. For example, the tongue twister ‘parade fad foot patrol’ put the similar pair /p, f/ in shared word initial position, but different stress position. Shattuck-Hufnagel (1992) found errors were less frequent when the segments were not both word onsets (e.g., word onset and a word medial syllable onset). Errors were also less frequent with a difference in syllable stress (e.g., word onset in a stressed syllable and word onset in an unstressed syllable, as in ‘parade fad foot patrol’). It has also been claimed that speech errors respect the phonological/phonotactic patterns of the language. For example, in the error /tæp stAbz/ for ‘tab stops,’ the exchange of /p/ with /b/ also changes the voicing of the plural morpheme, as required by English phonology. Dell et al. (2000) systematically examined phonological constraints on speech errors using tongue twisters. They found that facts of language phonotactics, such as /h/ only appears as a

While most of the research on phonological speech errors has used English-language data, some studies have explored how cross-linguistic differences influence speech errors. For example, evidence for the psychological reality of the Arabic root-and-pattern morphological structure has been found. Speech errors by Arabic speakers rearrange the segments within a root morpheme far more frequently than speech errors by English speakers or German speakers rearrange the segments within a word (Berg and Abd-El-Jawad, 1996). For example, a Jordanian Arabic speaker’s production of /milih/ when the intended word was /hilim/ ‘dream’ contains a word internal rearrangement of consonants in the root morpheme. Interestingly, this error also changes the prosodic position of the consonants (by switching an onset with a coda). Word-internal segment rearrangement errors like this in Arabic are less sensitive to syllable structure constraints than errors that rearrange segments between two different words. For between-word errors, Arabic is similar to English in respecting prosodic position. This suggests that word-internal root consonant rearrangement errors in Arabic apply at the consonantal root level of representation, which is a level that is specific to the morphology of root-and-pattern languages.

738 Speech Errors as Evidence in Phonology

Chen (2000) examined speech errors in Chinese. The phonological inventory of Chinese is much more limited than English, which reduces the need for subsyllabic units in the analysis of Chinese. As a result, it may be that Chinese speakers utilize syllable-sized chunks in processing. Syllable-sized chunks are also reflected in the Chinese writing system. Thus, syllable unit errors are likely to be more frequent in Chinese than in English. Chen (2000) found that syllable errors do occur relatively frequently in Chinese, and at a rate that is higher than predicted from analyzing syllable errors as errors involving multiple subsyllabic units.

The Validity of Speech Error Data All of the phonological speech error data discussed thus far was collected using phonetic transcription. Phonetic transcription is limited as a research tool in many ways. The transcription system itself is inherently segmentally based, and transcription depends on the perception of the listener (Boucher, 1994). Thus, the apparent abstractness of phonological speech errors may follow from perceptual biases in the listener rather than real abstractness in the data. Recent research has begun to address this issue by examining speech errors instrumentally, using the tools of phonetics. Mowrey and MacKay (1990) examined muscle fiber activation in the production of tongue twisters and found a wide range of variation in production. Aberrant muscle activations were found that were appropriate for the normal production of an incorrect segment. However, much smaller aberrant muscle activations were also found, suggesting that partial or gradient errors frequently occurred. These gradient errors were frequently imperceptible to the experimenters. Frisch and Wright (2002) conducted an acoustic study of voicing errors in fricatives. They found cases of partial voicing or devoicing of fricatives. They also found a systematic bias in their perception of fricative voicing errors. Almost any amount of voicing of a fricative resulted in the percept of a voiced fricative, while complete voicelessness was required to get a perception of a voiceless fricative. Thus, a transcription-based study of speech errors would have concluded that errors from a voiceless fricative to a voiced fricative were much more common than the reverse, even though that was not true acoustically. Pouplier (2003) examined speech articulation during the production of speech errors using electromagnetic midsagital articulometry (EMA) to track tongue

movement. Pouplier found that many errors cannot be explained as the rearrangement of abstract phonological constituents. Many errors were found that reflected partial activation of gestures, resulting in incomplete movement of an articulator that was imperceptible to listeners. These errors also often resulted in gestural sequences that were abnormal, and thus phonotactically illegal. Together, these instrumental studies of speech errors call into question the validity of speech error evidence as evidence for traditional notions of phonological constituents and constraints as nonquantitative, abstract symbols governed by inviolable rules. However, speech error evidence is not unique in this regard. Research in other domains of phonetics and phonology has also found that phonological competence may be quantative and grounded in less abstract phonetic categories. This suggests that speech error data will continue to provide converging evidence for the structure and organization of the phonological system within and across languages. See also: Experimental Phonology; Handling Variation in

Speech and Language Processing; Phoneme; Phonology in the Production of Words; Researching Naturally Occurring Speech; Speech Errors: Psycholinguistic Approach; Speech Production; Syllable: Phonology.

Bibliography Baars B, Motley M & MacKay D (1975). ‘Output editing for lexical status from artificially elicited slips of the tongue.’ Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 14, 382–391. Berg T & Abd-El-Jawad H (1996). ‘The unfolding of suprasegmental representations: a cross-linguistic perspective.’ Journal of Linguistics 32, 291–324. Boucher V (1994). ‘Alphabet-related biases in psycholinguistic enquiries: considerations for direct theories of speech production and perception.’ Journal of Phonetics 22, 1–18. Chen J-Y (2000). ‘Syllable errors from naturalistic slips of the tongue in Mandarin Chinese.’ Psychologia 43, 15–26. Dell G S (1986). ‘A spreading activation theory of retrieval in sentence production.’ Psychological Review 93, 283–321. Dell G S (1995). ‘Speaking and misspeaking.’ In Gleitman L & Liberman M (eds.) An invitation to cognitive science, vol. 1: language. Cambridge: MIT Press. 183–208. Dell G S & Reich P (1980). ‘Toward a unified theory of slips of the tongue.’ In Fromkin V (ed.) Errors in linguistic performance: slips of the tongue, ear, pen, and hand. New York: Academic Press. 273–286. Dell G S, Reed K D, Adams D R & Meyer A S (2000). ‘Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit

Speech Errors: Psycholinguistic Approach 739 learning: a study of the role of experience in language production.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 26, 1355–1367. Frisch S A & Wright R A (2002). ‘The phonetics of phonological speech errors: an acoustic analysis of slips of the tongue.’ Journal of Phonetics 30, 139–162. Fromkin V (1971). ‘The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances.’ Language 47(1), 27–52. Laver J (1980). ‘Slips of the tongue as neuromuscular evidence for a model of speech production.’ In Dechert H & Raupach M (eds.) Temporal variables in speech. The Hague: Mouton. 21–26. Levelt W M (1989). Speaking: from intention to articulation. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Mowrey R & MacKay I (1990). ‘Phonological primitives: electro-myographic speech error evidence.’ Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 88(3), 1299–1312. Pouplier M (2003). Units of phonological encoding: empirical evidence. Ph.D. diss., Yale University. Shattuck-Hufnagel S (1992). ‘The role of word structure in segmental serial ordering.’ Cognition 42, 213–259. Stemberger J P (1983). Speech errors and theoretical phonology: a review. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club. Van den Broeke & Goldstein (1980). ‘Consonant features in speech errors.’ In Fromkin V (ed.) Errors in linguistic performance: slips of the tongue, ear, pen, and hand. New York: Academic Press. 47–65.

Speech Errors: Psycholinguistic Approach T A Harley, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Natural speech is far from perfect: it is replete with filled and unfilled hesitations and errors. A speech error is a mismatch between what we intend to say and what we actually say. This article focuses upon mismatches involving the sounds of the language, called slips of the tongue, and will not cover hesitations in speech. Speech errors made by nonbraindamaged speakers resemble the errors made by speakers with brain damage, and the study of both sorts of error has revealed a great deal about how humans produce language, and about the relation between language and the brain. This article focuses on the speech of nonbrain-damaged speakers.

Classification of Speech Errors Speech errors can be classified according to the units of processing and types of mechanism involved. The units involved in slips of the tongue range from phrases, through words (e.g., saying ‘pass the pepper’ instead of ‘pass the salt’), morphemes, and phonemes (e.g., saying ‘flock of bats’ instead of ‘block of flats’), to features (e.g., saying ‘turn the knop’ instead of ‘knob’). Mechanisms include anticipations (e.g., saying ‘the mirst of May’ instead of ‘the first’), perseverations (e.g., saying ‘God rest re merry gentlemen’ instead of ‘God rest ye’), exchanges (e.g., ‘Guess whose mind came to name?’ instead of ‘name came to mind’), substitutions (‘Get me a fork’ instead of ‘knife’), and blends (saying ‘chung’ for ‘children’ and ‘young’).

Two particular types of speech error deserve special mention. Spoonerisms are errors where the initial consonants of words have exchanged. They are named after the Reverend Dr William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden of New College, Oxford, who was particularly prone to making this sort of error (and indeed, may have suffered from a mild developmental language disorder). Some examples of alleged errors made by Dr Spooner are: (1) You have wasted the whole term ! You have tasted the whole worm. (2) The Lord is a loving shepherd to his flock ! The Lord is a shoving leopard to his flock.

Note that in both of these examples the error strings produced form words; these errors are therefore possible instances of the lexical bias effect described below. Malapropisms are named after Mrs Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Rivals. Mrs Malaprop often used grand words incorrectly, such as saying ‘epitaphs’ for ‘epithets’ and ‘reprehend’ for ‘apprehend.’ Following Fay and Cutler (1977), the term has been used for all phonological word substitutions that inadvertently arise from processing difficulty, rather than ignorance, such as: (3) Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody ! Liszt’s Hungarian restaurant

Methodology of Speech Error Collection There are two main techniques for collecting speech errors. The first method involves recorders noting speech errors they observe in everyday life. This methodology has two advantages. First, it is