Speech Errors in the Production of Initial Consonant Clusters: The Roles of Frequency and Sonority

Abstract

Purpose: One of the central questions in speech production research is to what degree certain structures have an inherent difficulty and to what degree repeated encounter and practice make them easier to process. The goal of this article was to determine the extent to which frequency and sonority distance of consonant clusters predict production difficulties. Method: We used a tongue twister paradigm to elicit speech errors on syllable-initial German consonant clusters and investigated the relative influences of cluster frequency and sonority distance between the consonants of a cluster on production accuracy. Native speakers of German produced pairs of monosyllabic pseudowords beginning with consonant clusters at a high speech rate. Results: Error rates decreased with increasing frequency of the consonant clusters. A high sonority distance, on the other hand, did not facilitate a cluster's production, but speech errors led to optimized sonority structure for a subgroup of clusters. In addition, the combination of consonant clusters in a stimulus pair has a great impact on production accuracy. Conclusion: These results suggest that both frequency of use and sonority distance codetermine production ease, as well as syntagmatic competition between adjacent sound sequences.

Word frequency and cognitive effort in turns-at-talk: turn structure affects processing load in natural conversation

“…also Levelt et al, 1999 ; Indefrey and Levelt, 2004 ). A similar frequency effect has been observed on the sublexical level, with high-frequency syllables being produced significantly faster (independent of the word frequency effect; Levelt and Wheeldon, 1994 ) 1 and with greater error-resistance under adverse conditions (as in aphasic speech or tongue twisters) (Aichert and Ziegler, 2004 ; Wulfert et al, 2022 ).…”

A Morphophonological Analysis of -Um- in Javanese

“…If, as illustrated in (13) above, the -um-in Javanese targets the left root word boundary; and the different outcomes between vowel-initial root (13a), and consonant-initial root (13b) is simply a matter of Onset Metathesis availability, then why would roots that starts with an /l/ behave differently from other consonants (11 b)? To answer this, I have to make some reference to the Sonority Sequencing Generalization (SSG) (Zec, 2007;Bhatta, 2021;Kord, 2018;Wulfert, & Hanulíková, 2022). According to the SSG principle, the vowel nucleus in a syllable is always the most sonorousthe loudest soundin the syllable, and the sonority of other co-occurring sounds decrease towards both the left and right tail of the syllable.…”

Ikimokyklinio ir priešmokyklinio amžiaus vaikų gebėjimas ištarti priebalsių samplaikas

“…Vokiečių kalbos tyrimas taip pat parodė, kad rečiau klystama tariant dažnai kalboje pasitaikančias priebalsių samplaikas (žr. Wulfert et al, 2022).…”