14 Dec 2004

Marianne Pouplier

In the past years, there have been an increasing number of instrumental investigations as to the nature of speech production errors, prompted by the concern that decades of transcription based speech error data may be tainted by perceptual biases. While all of these instrumental studies suggest that errors are not, as previously thought, necessarily a matter of all-or-none, it is unclear what implications these studies have for phonological encoding as a cognitive process. Concerns have been raised that due to the tongue-twister based designs employed, the ill-formed errors obtained in these studies may be low-level motor execution errors or altogether task-artifacts. In this talk I will report tongue movement data collected during an error elicitation experiment that uses priming instead of overt repetition (SLIP; Motley & Baars 1976) to elicit errors. This study by and large confirms results from tongue-twister based designs, yet there is still a considerable gap to bridge to natural speech. Our current work focuses on the development of new elicitation techniques that negotiate the constraints imposed by the instrumentation, error elicitation and naturalness of speech in a new fashion.

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