Towards the Quantification of Peggy Babcock: Speech Errors and Their Position within the Word

Abstract

Sequences of similar (i.e., partially identical) words can be hard to say, as indicated by error frequencies, longer reaction and execution times. This study investigates the role of the location of this partial identity and the accompanying differences, i.e. whether errors are more frequent with mismatches in word onsets (top cop), codas (top tock) or both (pop tot). Number of syllables (tippy ticky) and empty positions (top ta) were also varied. Since the gradient nature of errors can be difficult to determine acoustically, articulatory data were investigated. Articulator movements were recorded using electromagnetic articulography, for up to 9 speakers of American English repeatedly producing 2-word sequences to an accelerating metronome. Most word pairs showed more intrusions and greater variability in coda than in onset position, in contrast to the predominance of onset position errors in corpora from perceptual observation.

Speech Sound Disorders in Children: An Articulatory Phonology Perspective

“…Moreover, findings from ultrasound tongue motion data during the production of repeated two-and three-word phrases with shared consonants in coda (e.g., top cop) versus no-coda positions (e.g., taa kaa, taa kaa taa) have demonstrated a gestural intrusion bias only for the shared coda consonant condition (Pouplier, 2008). These findings suggest that the presence of (shared) coda consonants is a trigger for a destabilizing influence on the speech motor system (Pouplier, 2008;Mooshammer et al, 2018).…”

Noggin Nodding: Head Movement Correlates With Increased Effort in Accelerating Speech Production Tasks

“…The list of words used is given in Table 1, which were presented in a total of 39 different pairings (including reverse orderings when not identical), although not all participants produced every combination. The word pair alternation trials were collected as blocks within a larger experiment probing speech errors in production, presented in Mooshammer et al (2018).…”

“…When a reduction or intrusion error in one alternating articulator co-occurs with an error of the opposite polarity in its partner, a substitution error is identified. Following this approach, described more fully as the “error rate” procedure in Mooshammer et al (2018), errors of these three types were labeled using a semiautomatic interactive procedure on the TD, TT, and LA trajectories of each trial. Figure 2 provides an example.…”

“…Previous work has established that the repetition of word pairs with partial similarity (e.g., top cop ) results in more production errors than either identical or entirely dissimilar words (Meyer and Gordon, 1985), and that alternating codas are slower to produce and more errorful than alternating onsets (Sevald and Dell, 1994). Kinematic studies of such sequences have confirmed this asymmetry (Mooshammer et al, 2018) and have shown that systematic alternation can lead to inappropriate suppression of the target constriction (a reduction error) or co-constriction of the non-targeted articulator (an intrusion), which in both cases may be partial or subphonemic (Pouplier, 2003; Goldstein et al, 2007). Kinematic studies of alternating sequences have also shown that more errors occur at higher production rates and that intrusion errors are more common (Goldstein et al, 2007; Slis and Van Lieshout, 2016).…”