Cross-Linguistic Trends in Speech Errors: An Analysis of Sub-Lexical Errors in Cantonese

Abstract

Though past research on the sound structure of speech errors has contributed greatly to our understanding of phonological encoding, most of this research comes from a small set of majority languages with similar linguistic structures. To increase the linguistic diversity of relevant evidence, a large collection of speech errors was investigated in Cantonese, an under-studied language with unique phonological structures. In particular, the Cantonese data were examined for nine psycholinguistic effects commonly used as a lens on word-form encoding. Detailed quantitative analysis found that Cantonese has eight of these effects, providing broader cross-linguistic support for models based on these patterns. Yet Cantonese also exhibited differences with well-known Indo-European languages by having a higher rate of errors involving whole syllables and sub-constituents inside the syllable rime. These differences can be accounted for by recognizing the primacy of the syllable and mora in encoding Cantonese words, following proposals that have been made for Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.

Language generality in phonological encoding: Moving beyond Indo‐European languages

“…As has been noted in anthologised volumes on word form encoding in particular (Meyer & Belke, 2007), and language production in general (Costa et al., 2007; Griffin & Crew, 2012), most of the generalisations supporting the consensus model have come from investigations of Indo‐European languages, and as such they do not fully reflect the diversity of human language. Indeed, literature surveys of language production research (Alderete, 2022; Chen et al., 2002) have shown that this research has a strong bias towards the Indo‐European languages and other major languages of the world, reflecting the same bias found in the larger field of psycholinguistics (Anand et al., 2011).…”

“…The word onset effect in speech errors is cross‐linguistically robust. Above chance rates of errors in word initial position have been found in German (Berg, 1991), two large studies of English (Shattuck‐Hufnagel, 1987; Vousden et al., 2000), Cantonese (Alderete, 2022), and Korean (Han et al., 2019). However, Spanish sound errors appear to contravene this consensus.…”

“…If glides and vowels were pre‐compiled for syllable roles, we would expect some resistance to these accommodations, but Wan gives 31 examples of this interaction and it is exceptionless. Japanese and Cantonese have similar violations of the consonant‐vowel constraint, except they occur in the coda position (for Japanese see Kubozono, 1989, Cantonese, Alderete, 2022). Coda consonants can be re‐assigned to the second position of a vowel nucleus, as in /tsau22/ → tsak22 就 ‘then’, and vice versa (vowels swap with consonants), which again is unexpected if these segments are locked into pre‐determined syllabic roles (see Kubozono (1989) on the role of the mora for establishing the slot for this substitution).…”

“…Chen found that even with rather conservative assumptions, syllable errors occur at rates well above chance in Mandarin. Recent work investigated syllable errors using similar methods in a related Chinese language, Cantonese, and again found a significant presence of such errors (Alderete, 2022).…”

Phonological encoding in Tongan: An experimental investigation

“…In Dutch, for example, there are indeed many phoneme errors when compared with syllabic errors. However, Alderete (2022) has shown that phoneme slips are also relatively frequent in Chinese (e.g., additions such as /uk55/ → luk55 “house”), yet, significant numbers of syllable errors also exist in Cantonese 1 . However, the existence of phoneme slips in Cantonese does not mean that the Cantonese IPU is the phoneme (as far as we know no significant onset effects are found in Cantonese experiments investigating the IPU).…”