Tone slips in Cantonese: Evidence for early phonological encoding

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

“…Another psychological effect is the phonological similarity effect, or the tendency for phonological substitutions in which intended and intruder sounds are phonologically similar ( MacKay, 1970 ; Shattuck-Hufnagel & Klatt, 1979 ). Tone in SFUSED Cantonese has been investigated and shown to exhibit a similarity effect ( Alderete et al, 2019 ). Here, we use the same methods to probe similarity in confusion matrices for consonants and vowels.…”

“…Chen (2000) found that they occur in 8.4% of his corpus. In the context of syllable encoding in Cantonese, Alderete et al (2019) documented a rate of syllable errors somewhere between these two rates. For all sound errors, including additions, deletions, and substitutions, errors in which the error string is a coherent syllable occurred at a rate of 4.57%, which is about half of Chen’s rate for Mandarin, but still non-negligible.…”

“…In the more straightforward cases, we use a chi-square test to probe deviation from chance ( Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1979 ; Stemberger, 1989 ). However, the similarity effect is not suitable for this test, so that, it was tested using a Mantel test for correlations between two matrices (see Alderete et al, 2019 ).…”

“…For example, the transitional probabilities from initial segments to non-initial segments differ in English and Spanish, and this may account for the relative stability of word onsets in Spanish ( Griffin & Crew, 2012 ). The impact of language particular structures on speech error patterns has been investigated in a range of additional structures, including the impact of syllabic role on glides ( Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1986 ; Shen, 1993 ; Wan, 1997 ), tone structure ( Alderete et al, 2019 ; J.-Y. Chen, 1999 ; Gandour, 1977 ; Wan & Jaeger, 1998 ), language particular morphology ( Abd-El-Jawad & Abu-Salim, 1987 ; Berg & Abd-El-Jawad, 1996 ; Han et al, 2019 ), stress patterns ( Berg, 1991 ; Ohala & Ohala, 1988 ; Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1986 ), skeletal CV structure ( Hartsuiker, 2002 ; Stemberger, 1984 ), and syllable inventories ( J.-Y.…”

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

“…In Mandarin, the proximate unit is a syllable, and the syllable is the starting point for words, as confirmed in speech errors and experimental tests. But the selection of segments still proceeds, syllable by syllable, as well ( see Figure 1 ), and indeed speech error evidence in Chinese languages requires syllable-internal segmental encoding in addition to syllable encoding ( Alderete et al, 2019 ). Does syllable-internal encoding also involve a primacy gradient, with Start nodes enhancing activation of syllable-initial segments?…”