Speech Errors And Implicit Learning In Language Production

Speech errors follow the phonotactics of the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [η], the [η] will always appear in a syllable coda. The authors created 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.Speech errors reflect a speaker's knowledge of where sounds occur in syllables and words. Errors obey language-wide phootactic constraints; one rarely finds an error whose outcome containts an impossible sound sequence. At the some time, errors exhibit the syllable-position effect; when a sound moves from one syllable to another, it tends to stick to its position. We demonstrated these two phenomena experimentally and found, as well, a sensitivity to the distribution of sounds within an experiment.It claims , say something about both language and learning. With respect to language, the support what we called the breath of constraint hypothesis, a claim that patterns in language occur at many levels of generality, and the processing system is sentitive to all of these levels. Thus, we see error adherence to language-wide constraints (the phonotactic regularity effect) and to local positional constraints (the syllable-position effect) as two ends of a continuum. The former applies to the whole language, and the latter applies to a single word or syllable. Our finding of sensitivity to experiment-wide constraints is intermediate between these extremes.With respect to learning, our data illustrate the implicit learning of sequential patterns. akin to the many experiments in which participants push buttons in response to rule-governed sequences of stimuli. The learning that occurred in our studies was implicit, as this term is normally used. The error patterns were unaffected by informing the participants of the sound distributions in their syllables, and those whowere uninformed did not report any knowledge of the distribution when asked .Furthermore, the task required of the participants, repeating syllables, can be performed quickly and does not necessarily require any knowledge of the experimentally manipulated patterns. Finally, the data of interest, errors, were not intended responses by our speakers. Hence, it is difficult to see the error pattern resulting in a simple way from speakers' conscious intentions.The results illustrate the implicit learning of the sequential constraints present in the stimuli and show that language production system adapts to recent experience, provide some useful references for the study of Chinese.To conclude, we return to the phonotactic regularity of speech errors. Why does this effect occur? Our experiments invite the conclusion that at least part of the effect is the result of recent experience. You may say "blug" instead of "bug" because you have said words beginning with [bl] in your recent past. But you would never say "Ibug" Perhaps that is because your phonology does not allow syllable initial[lb].But perhaps it is instead because you do not have any recent experience saying this cluster. Some modern phonological theories tend to see the phonology of a language as being projected from its lexicon. That is, there is no independent abstract representation of phonological patterns aside from what is stored in the lexicon. Or, if there is some abstraction, it is computed from the contents of the lexicon. We would only add to this notion that the phonology is projected preferentially from those parts of the lexicon that are most accessible, such as recently experienced sound forms.