| While many studies have examined the behavior of phonemes in experimentally elicited speech errors (e.g. Baars & Motley, 1976; Butterworth & Whittaker, 1980; Dell, 1986; Dell, Reed, Adams, & Meyer, 2000; Stemberger, 1991), none have looked at unambiguous phonetic feature errors in speech error experiments. To date, examinations of feature errors and what such errors tell us about the function of phonetic features in language planning have come from examinations of naturally occurring speech error corpora (Shattuck-Hufnagel & Klatt, 1979, Stemberger, 1982). Four experiments were conducted to examine unambiguous feature errors in error elicitation tasks. Considerably more feature errors were produced than would be expected based on naturally occurring errors or current theories of language production. Analyses comparing the behavior of the phoneme and feature errors found that feature errors behave very similarly to phoneme errors. A proposal of how models of language production could accommodate these findings is made. |
