Slip of the tongue :Evidence of a Hierarchical Model of Speech Production

Abstract

Research on speech programming has besically concentrated on the units of sreech production. The phoneme has widely been claimed (Dantloff and Hammerberg, 1973 Mackay, 1970) and so have the allophone (Wickelgren, 1969) and the feature (Benguerel and Cowan, 1974, Henke, 1966). perceptually, the syllable has been emphasized (Studdert- Kennedy, 1976). This controverslal Issue has been investigated in the context of slips of the tongue as produced by hative speakers of Arabic of varlous ages and under different mental and physical condit lons (anxiety, fear, illness and fatigue). Such speech errors mainly consist of transposit lon. addition, and omission of sounds and sound sequences. Categorization of such speech errors shows that units of different magnitudes are involved. If we accept the view that such units enter into the programme for speech production, then we can conclude that the building blocks of the production plan are hierarchical with the feature being the smallest unt in the hiererchy. The present investigation also shows that both anticipatory and carryover processes are involved in speech errors. A unit was either realized early in the utterance in anticipation of another occurring later, or carried over to replace a later unit, a finding which implies a scanning device which is equipped with a memory and sweeps over the plan within a temporal window spanning the utterance as a whole.

Keywords

• slip
• tongue
• speech