Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
1101166 Journal of Phonetics 2008 27 Pages PDF
Abstract

Speech errors are known to exhibit an intrusion bias in that segments are added rather than deleted; also, a shared final consonant can cause an interaction of the initial consonants. A principled connection between these two phenomena has been drawn in a gestural account of errors: Articulatory measures revealed a preponderance of errors in which both the target and intruding gesture are co-produced, instead of one replacing the other. This gestural intrusion bias has been interpreted as an errorful coupling of gestures in a dynamically stable coordination mode (1:1, in-phase), triggered by the presence of a shared coda consonant. Capturing tongue motion with ultrasound, the current paper investigates whether shared gestural composition other than a coda can trigger gestural co-production errors. Subjects repeated two-word phrases with alternating initial stop or fricative consonants in a coda condition (e.g., top cop), a no-coda condition (e.g., taa kaa), and a three-word phrase condition (e.g., taa kaa taa). The no-coda condition showed a lower error rate than the coda condition. The three-word phrase condition elicited an intermediate error rate for the stop consonants, but a high error rate for the fricative alternations. While all conditions exhibited both substitution and co-production errors, a gestural intrusion bias emerged mainly for the coda condition. The findings suggest that the proportion of different error types (substitutions, co-production errors) differs as a function of stimulus type: not all alternating stimulus patterns that trigger errors result in an intrusion bias.

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Social Sciences and Humanities Arts and Humanities Language and Linguistics
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