Speech errors in early child language production

Stemberger, Joseph Paul

doi:10.1016/0749-596x(89)90042-9

Cited by 112 publications

(132 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Their model (e.g., Berg, 1988;Schade, 1992) is an example of a frame-based activation model that uses self-inhibition to deactivate structure and content units after they have been fully activated. Less effective self-inhibition would correspond, in our model, to a higher value of c. Stemberger (1989) suggested that children may have a slower (smaller) decay of activation (our d) than adults. Each of these proposals, a decrease in w or d, or an increase in c, leads to more errors and a lower AP in the model.…”

Section: What Is Causing the Variation In Error Rate And Ap?mentioning

confidence: 67%

Language production and serial order: A functional analysis and a model.

Dell¹,

Burger²,

Svec³

1997

Psychological Review

376

402

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In speech production, previously spoken and upcoming words can impinge on the word currently being said, resulting in perseverations (e.g., "beef needle soup" ) and anticipations (e.g., "cuff of coffee" ). These errors reveal the extent to which the language-production system is focused on the past, the present, and the future and therefore are informative about how the system deals with serial order. This article offers a functional analysis of serial order in language and develops a general formal model. The centerpiece of the model is a prediction that the fraction of serial-order errors that are anticipatory, as opposed to perseveratory, can be closely predicted by overall error rate. The lower the error rate, the more anticipatory the errors are, regardless of the factors influencing error rate. The model is successfully applied to experimental and natural error data dealing with the effects of practice, speech rate, individual differences, age, and brain damage.More than 45 years ago, Lashley ( 1951 ) directed the attention of psychologists to the problem of serial order. Ordered behavior, he wrote, cannot simply be the product of associations between elementary responses. Instead, there must be a hierarchically organized plan or schema that is separate from the responses and yet determines their order. Although it took some time for Lashley's paper to be appreciated (Bruce, 1994), his insights are now acknowledged to be central to theory in memory (e.g., Murdock, 1974), psycholinguisties (e.g., Levelt, 1989;MacKay, 1987), and motor control (e.g., Rosenbaum, 1990).This article examines the nature of order schemata in that behavior in which the serial-ordering problems are perhaps most acute, in language. We begin by reviewing evidence from serialorder errors in speech, particularly errors in which sounds or words are either anticipated, spoken ahead of their time, or perseverated, produced later than they should be. This evidence suggests that the past and future often impinge on the present while we are speaking and that the extent to which the languageproduction system is focused on the past or the future depends on a number of factors.We then present an experimental study of one of these factors, Gary S. Dell and Lisa K. Burger, Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; William R. Svec, Department of Psychology, Indiana University Bloomington.This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant SBR 93-19368 and National Institutes of Health Grants DC-00191 and HD 21011 and grew out of a project involving Gary S. Dell, Myrna Schwartz, Eleanor Saffran, and Nadine Martin.We are grateful for the advice of David Adams, Howard Berenbaum, Gary Bradshaw, Kay Bock, Cooper Cutting, Vic Ferreira, Zenzi Griffin, Susan Garnsey, Anita Govindjee, Prahlad Gupta, John Huitema, Gordon Logan, Gregory Murphy, Neal Pearlmutter, Brian Ross, Christine Sevald, and Ulrich Schade and for the contributions of Linda May, Julie Owles, and the Beckman Institute.Correspondence concerning this article ...

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Section: What Is Causing the Variation In Error Rate And Ap?mentioning

confidence: 67%

Language production and serial order: A functional analysis and a model.

Dell¹,

Burger²,

Svec³

1997

Psychological Review

376

402

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In fact, our finding is somewhat weaker than what one would expect from reports of the syllable-position effect in the speech error literature. For example, in Stemberger's (1989) analysis of English between-words conso-* violates experiment-wide constraints. ** violates language-wide constraints.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit learning: A study of the role of experience in language production.

Dell¹,

Reed²,

Adams³

et al. 2000

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

194

286

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Speech errors follow the phonotactics of the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [n], the [q] will always appear in a syllable coda. The authors created an analogue to this phenomenon by having participants recite lists of consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in 4 sessions on different days. In the first 2 experiments, some consonants were always onsets, some were always codas, and some could be both. In a third experiment, the set of possible onsets and codas depended on vowel identity. In all 3 studies, the production errors that occurred respected the "phonotactics" of the experiment The results illustrate the implicit learning of the sequential constraints present in the stimuli and show that the language production system adapts to recent experience.We know that "king" is a word of English and that, as far as we can tell, "hing" is not. However, most people would not be greatly surprised to hear that "hing" is a word that they just do not know. This is because [hlrj] is well formed. Each of its phonemes occur in English, and their ordering is consistent with English phonotactics, the constraints that define the language's sound sequences.Just as it is apparent that "hing" is a possible word, it is even more apparent that [rjlh] is not. It violates phonotactic constraints that [h] must occur in onset position (i.e., it must begin a syllable) and that [rj] must occur postvocalically in a syllable, in the coda position. Although syllables in other languages may begin with [rj] (e.g., Burmese) or end with [h] (e.g., Hebrew), no English syllables do.Knowledge of a language's phonotactics does more than underlie intuitions about possible lexical items. It plays a major role in language acquisition and processing. Adults use their knowledge of possible sound sequences to aid in the identification of speech

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“…Piaget, 1976), evidence from observational and diary studies suggests that children are able to self-correct errors in word production almost as soon as they are able to speak (Clark, 1978;Jaeger 1992Jaeger , 2004Stemberger, 1989). Consistent with these claims, Levy (1999) showed that 2-3 yearold children could often respond appropriately to requests for clarification of what they had just said.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Did I say dog or cat? A study of semantic error detection and correction in children

Hanley

Cortis

Budd

et al. 2016

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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While naturalistic studies of spontaneous speech suggest that young children can monitor their speech, the mechanisms for detection and correction of speech errors in children are not well understood. In particular, there is little research on monitoring semantic errors in this population. This study provides a systematic investigation of detection and correction of semantic errors in children between the ages of 5 and 8, as they produced sentences to describe simple visual events involving nine highly familiar animals (the moving animals task). Results showed that older children made fewer errors and corrected a larger proportion of the errors that they made than younger children. We then tested the prediction of a production-based account of error monitoring that the strength of the language production system, and specifically its semantic-lexical component, should be correlated with the ability to detect and repair semantic errors. Strength of semantic-lexical mapping, as well as lexical-phonological mapping, was estimated individually for children by fitting their error patterns, obtained from an independent picture naming task, to a computational model of language production (Foygel & Dell, 2000). Children's picture naming performance was predictive of 3 their ability to monitor their semantic errors, above and beyond age. This relationship was specific to the strength of the semantic-lexical part of the system, as predicted by the production-based monitor.

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Speech errors in early child language production

Cited by 112 publications

References 18 publications

Language production and serial order: A functional analysis and a model.

Language production and serial order: A functional analysis and a model.

Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit learning: A study of the role of experience in language production.

Did I say dog or cat? A study of semantic error detection and correction in children

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