Bound morpheme loss errors in normal and agrammatic speech: One mechanism or two?

Loss errors involving bound morphemes in normal and agrammatic speech are examined to determine if all errors can be due to a single processing problem. It is concluded that two problems are present. First, there is a general problem with accessing bound morphemes (or forms containing bound morphemes), leading to the production of the base form. Second, there is a syntactic problem involving agreement. In agrammatism, the first problem is differentially exacerbated. Implications for normal and agrammatic speech are examined.     

Talking about Personality: Evidence for Attributions to Self and Others in Early Childhood

ABSTRACT

The early use of person perception terms was examined via an analysis of the spontaneous speech of four young children in conversation with their parents at home. All four children were producing such terms early in their third year. Like their parents, children used the terms in two distinguishable ways: to attribute a trait to a person or to characterize a person’s ongoing action. Most of these terms were evaluative, whether positive or negative. Parents often made direct comments to their children about both their traits and ongoing actions; children made similar comments about themselves. Parents also used person perception terms to make comments about others who were not party to the conversation; children did likewise. A considerable proportion of the trait terms that children produced served as interpretive comments on someone’s actions or preferences. Our findings suggest that from an early age, children are trait theorists. Not only do they describe ongoing actions using trait vocabulary, they interpret those ongoing actions by attributing traits.     

Perceptual Bias in Speech Error Data Collection: Insights from Spanish Speech Errors

This paper studies the reliability and validity of naturalistic speech errors as a tool for language production research. Possible biases when collecting naturalistic speech errors are identified and specific predictions derived. These patterns are then contrasted with published reports from Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) and one Romance language (Spanish). Unlike findings in the Germanic languages, Spanish speech errors show many patterns which run contrary to those expected from bias: (1) more phonological errors occur between words than within word; (2) word-initial consonants are less likely to participate in errors than word-medial consonants, (3) errors are equally likely in stressed and in unstressed syllables, (4) perseverations are more frequent than anticipations, and (5) there is no trace of a lexical bias. We present a new corpus of Spanish speech errors collected by many theoretically naïve observers (whereas the only corpus available so far was collected by two highly trained theoretically informed observers), give a general overview of it, and use it to replicate previous reports. In spite of the different susceptibility of these methods to bias, results were remarkably similar in both corpora and again contrary to predictions from bias. As a result, collecting speech errors “in the wild” seems to be free of bias to a reasonable extent even when using a multiple-collector method. The observed contrasting patterns between Spanish and Germanic languages arise as true cross-linguistic differences.     

Mental Imagery and Post-Event Processing in Anticipation of a Speech Performance Among Socially Anxious Individuals

The present study investigated whether post-event processing (PEP) involving mental imagery about a past speech is particularly detrimental for socially anxious individuals who are currently anticipating giving a speech. One hundred fourteen high and low socially anxious participants were told they would give a 5 min impromptu speech at the end of the experimental session. They were randomly assigned to one of three manipulation conditions: post-event processing about a past speech incorporating imagery (PEP-Imagery), semantic post-event processing about a past speech (PEP-Semantic), or a control condition, (n = 19 per experimental group, per condition [high vs low socially anxious]). After the condition inductions, individuals’ anxiety, their predictions of performance in the anticipated speech, and their interpretations of other ambiguous social events were measured. Consistent with predictions, high socially anxious individuals in the PEP-Imagery condition displayed greater anxiety than individuals in the other conditions immediately following the induction and before the anticipated speech task. They also interpreted ambiguous social scenarios in a more socially anxious manner than socially anxious individuals in the control condition. High socially anxious individuals made more negative predictions about their upcoming speech performance than low anxious participants in all conditions. The impact of imagery during post-event processing in social anxiety and its implications are discussed.     

Free Speech Fallacies as Meta-Argumentative Errors

Free speech fallacies are errors of meta-argument. One commits a free speech fallacy when one argues that since there are apparent restrictions on one’s rights of free expression, procedural rules of critical exchange have been broken, and consequently, one’s preferred view is dialectically better off than it may otherwise seem. Free speech fallacies are meta-argumentative, since they occur at the level of assessing the dialectical situation in terms of norms of argument and in terms of meta-evidential principles of interpreting how and why people follow (or fail to follow) argumentative rules. Our plan here is to begin with a brief explanation of meta-argument and meta-argumentative fallacy. We will then turn to the variety of forms of the free speech fallacy, which we will explain as meta-argumentatively erroneous.

     

Speech errors, disfluencies, and self-repairs of stutterers in two accuracy conditions

The purpose of the present study was to see whether the covert repair hypothesis, which views normal disfluencies as the by-products of covert self-repairing of internal speech (programming) errors, applies to habitual stutterers. To this end, we examined the effects of emphasis on speech accuracy in stutterers on three sorts of incidents: speech errors, disfluencies (also including stuttering), and self-repairs. In a condition in which they performed a speech task under instructions stressing the accuracy of speaking, stutterers made considerably fewer speech errors, than in a condition in which speech accuracy could be ignored. On the other hand, disfluency and self-repair rates remained about the same. They did increase, however, relative to speech error rates with accuracy emphasis. A control group of normal speakers performed in a similar way. Apparently, disfluencies behaved like self-repairs. These results support the covert repair hypothesis of disfluency, both for stutterers and for normal speakers.     

Serial control of phonology in speech production: a hierarchical model

A dynamic oscillator-based model of the sequencing of phonemes in speech production (OSCAR) is described. An analysis of phoneme movement errors (anticipations, perseverations, and exchanges) from a large naturalistic speech error corpus provides a new set of data suitable for quantitative modeling and is used to derive a set of constraints that any speech-production model must address. The new computational model is shown to account for error type proportions, movement error distance gradients, the syllable-position effect, and phonological similarity effects. The model provides an alternative to frame-based accounts, serial buffer accounts, and associative chaining theories of serial order processing in speech.     

Contrasting speech patterns in apraxia of speech and phonemic paraphasia

This study was designed to determine if perceptual phonological analysis would reveal distinctions between patients with apraxia of speech and patients with phonemic paraphasic speech. Test findings from 10 Broca's aphasics with apraxia of speech were compared to findings from 10 paraphasic speakers (5 conduction and 5 Wernicke's aphasics). Several marked differences were revealed. Predominant locus of errors and relative difficulty of different classes of phonemic segments were significant discriminators. There was a nonsignificant trend for substituted phonemes to be further from target phonetically in the paraphasic patients. In addition, the two groups showed certain consistent differences in the types of errors they produced. Apraxic patients produced many errors of transitionalization, while sequencing errors were more typical of the patients with phonemic paraphasia. The findings are interpreted in relation to a neuropsychological model of speech. It is suggested that phonemic paraphasia represents a breakdown mainly in the retrieval of phonological word patterns, while apraxia of speech is characterized predominantly by a disturbance in encoding phonological patterns into appropriate speech movements.     

The Influence of Phonological Context on the Sound Errors of a Speaker with Wernicke's Aphasia

A corpus of phonological errors produced in narrative speech by a Wernicke's aphasic speaker (R.W.B.) was tested for context effects using two new methods for establishing chance baselines. A reliable anticipatory effect was found using the second method, which estimated chance from the distance between phoneme repeats in the speech sample containing the errors. Relative to this baseline, error-source distances were shorter than expected for anticipations, but not perseverations. R.W.B.'s anticipation/perseveration ratio measured intermediate between a nonaphasic error corpus and that of a more severe aphasic speaker (both reported in Schwartz et al., 1994), supporting the view that the anticipatory bias correlates to severity. Finally, R.W.B's anticipations favored word-initial segments, although errors and sources did not consistently share word or syllable position.     

Processing and Learning of Japanese Double-Object Active and Causative Sentences: An Error-Feedback Paradigm

Do native speakers always outperform second-language (L2) learners in terms of speech processing accuracy? Surprisingly, the answer to this seemingly obvious question is no according to the study reported here. Indeed, native speakers sometimes make more errors than learners in interpreting their own first-language (L1) speech. In this competition experiment of the double-object active and transitive causative sentence processing strategies, six native Japanese speakers and nine English-speaking learners of Japanese participated. The participants were required to identify the agents of the main lexical verb (“doers”) of a series of Japanese sentences, each consisting of one verb and three noun phrases, in which word order and case-marking cues either competed or were consistent with each other. In the first (pretest) and last (posttest) parts of the study, participants received no feedback about the accuracy of their responses, whereas in the middle part they received immediate feedback. The stimulus sentences were such that a listener could determine the semantic role of noun phrases (actor, causer, or recipient) only by taking into consideration both the case markers and the verb's voice (active vs. causative). Learners of Japanese as a second language (JFLs) demonstrated an evident word order bias. Native Japanese speakers also made surprisingly numerous errors, by imposing the canonical case-marker sequence in reconstructing noncanonical sentences. Indeed some of the native Japanese revealed an even stronger word order bias than the learners, and they committed more errors than learners in interpreting noncanonical word order sentences. The results are explained in terms of the working memory constraint. Directions of further research are discussed.     

Effects of target monitoring on understanding fluent speech

Phoneme monitoring and word monitoring are two experimental tasks that have frequently been used to assess the processing of fluent speech. Each task is purported to provide an “online” measure of the comprehension process, and each requires listeners to pay conscious attention to some aspect or property of the sound structure of the speech signal. The present study is primarily a methodological one directed at the following question: Does the allocation of processing resources for conscious analysis of the sound structure of the speech signal affect ongoing comprehension processes or the ultimate level of understanding achieved for the content of the linguistic message? Our subjects listened to spoken stories. Then, to measure their comprehension, they answered multiple-choice questions about each story. During some stories, they were required to detect a specific phoneme; during other stories, they were required to detect a specific word; during still other stories, they were not required to monitor the utterance for any target. The monitoring results replicated earlier findings showing longer detection latencies for phoneme monitoring than for word monitoring. Somewhat surprisingly, the ancillary phoneme- and word-monitoring tasks did not adversely affect overall comprehension performance. This result undermines the specific criticism that on-line monitoring paradigms of this kind should not be used to study spoken language understanding because these tasks interfere with normal comprehension.     

Foreign accents reduce false recognition rates in the DRM paradigm

ABSTRACT

More cognitive resources are required to comprehend foreign-accented than native speech. Focusing these cognitive resources on resolving the acoustic mismatch between the foreign-accented input and listeners’ stored representations of spoken words can affect other cognitive processes. Across two studies, we explored whether processing foreign-accented speech reduces the activation of semantic information. This was achieved using the DRM paradigm, in which participants study word lists and typically falsely remember non-studied words (i.e. critical lures) semantically associated with the studied words. In two experiments, participants were presented with word lists spoken both by a native and a foreign-accented speaker. In both experiments we observed lower false recognition rates for the critical lures associated with word lists presented in a foreign accent, compared to native speech. In addition, participants freely recalled more studied words when they had been presented in a native, compared to a foreign, accent, although this difference only emerged in Experiment 2, where the foreign speaker had a very strong accent. These observations suggest that processing foreign-accented speech modulates the activation of semantic information.

Highlights

• The DRM paradigm was used to explore whether semantic activation is reduced when processing foreign-accented speech.

• Across two experiments, false recognition of non-studied semantic associates was lower when word lists were presented in a foreign accent, compared to native speech.

• The above results suggest semantic activation may be reduced when processing foreign-accented speech.

• Additionally, it was found that when the foreign speaker had a mild accent, correct recall of studied words was uninfluenced. If the foreign speaker had a strong accent, however, correct recall of studied words was reduced.

     

A critique of top-down independent levels models of speech production: Evidence from non-plan-internal speech errors

A number of speech errors are examined which are difficult to account for by top-down serial processing models of speech production which hove independent levels of processing. In particular, most of these errors are characterized by the presence of an interfering element which is external to the utterance under current construction. This paper has two main aims: to classify these errors, and to examine the constraints upon them. It is found that phonological similarity between the target and intrusion is a major determinant of error occurrence. The consequences for models of speech production are discussed in a framework consisting of the architecture and control structure of those models. A particular model to account for these data is proposed, consisting of a spreading activation lexical network.     

Interaction and representational integration: evidence from speech errors

We examine the mechanisms that support interaction between lexical, phonological and phonetic processes during language production. Studies of the phonetics of speech errors have provided evidence that partially activated lexical and phonological representations influence phonetic processing. We examine how these interactive effects are modulated by lexical frequency. Previous research has demonstrated that during lexical access, the processing of high frequency words is facilitated; in contrast, during phonetic encoding, the properties of low frequency words are enhanced. These contrasting effects provide the opportunity to distinguish two theoretical perspectives on how interaction between processing levels can be increased. A theory in which cascading activation is used to increase interaction predicts that the facilitation of high frequency words will enhance their influence on the phonetic properties of speech errors. Alternatively, if interaction is increased by integrating levels of representation, the phonetics of speech errors will reflect the retrieval of enhanced phonetic properties for low frequency words. Utilizing a novel statistical analysis method, we show that in experimentally induced speech errors low lexical frequency targets and outcomes exhibit enhanced phonetic processing. We sketch an interactive model of lexical, phonological and phonetic processing that accounts for the conflicting effects of lexical frequency on lexical access and phonetic processing.     

Developmental Deep Dyslexia in Japanese: A Case Study

This report demonstrates the existence of developmental deep dyslexia involving Japanese orthography. When asked to read (or name) isolated kanji, T.S., a sixth grader with a normal IQ and no speech impairment, produced a number of visual, selection, and semantic errors. It is suggested that these errors arise from an interaction between phonological coding impairment and the relative sparing of direct visual processing, which are taken to be characteristic of developmental deep dyslexia. A selection hypothesis is presented to explain selection errors, semantic errors, and some peculiar phenomena observed in acquired dyslexics.     

On building models of spoken-word recognition: When there is as much to learn from natural “oddities” as artificial normality

Much of what we know about spoken-word recognition comes from studies relying on speech stimuli either carefully produced in the laboratory or computer altered. Although such stimuli have allowed key constructs to be highlighted, the extent to which these constructs are operative in the processing of everyday speech is unclear. We argue that studying the recognition of naturally occurring degraded speech, such as that produced by individuals with neurological disease, can improve the external validity of existing spoken-word recognition models. This claim is illustrated in an experiment on the effect of talker-specific (indexical) variations on lexical access. We found that talker specificity effects, wherein words are better recalled if played in the same voice than in a different voice between two consecutive blocks, were greater when the words were spoken by dysarthric than by healthy individuals. The effects were found to relate to the increased processing time caused by the dysarthric stimuli, independently of their reduced intelligibility. This result is consistent with Luce, McLennan, and Charles-Luce's (2003) time-course hypothesis, which posits that reliance on indexical details increases when responses are delayed by suboptimal processing conditions. We conclude by advocating the use of laboratory and naturally occurring degraded speech in tandem and more systematic cross-talks between psycholinguistics and the speech sciences.     

Relationships between language structure and language learning: the suffixing preference and grammatical categorization

It is a reasonable assumption that universal properties of natural languages are not accidental. They occur either because they are underwritten by genetic code, because they assist in language processing or language learning, or due to some combination of the two. In this paper we investigate one such language universal: the suffixing preference across the world's languages, whereby inflections tend to be added to the end of words. A corpus analysis of child-directed speech in English found that suffixes were more accurate at cuing the grammatical category of the root word than were prefixes. An artificial language experiment found that there was a learning advantage for suffixes over prefixes in terms of grammatical categorization within an artificial language. The results are consistent with an account of language universals that originate in general purpose learning mechanisms.     

A technique for measuring processing load during speech production

A technique is presented for the measurement of fluctuations in processing demands during spontaneous speech. The technique consists of the analysis of errors on a secondary tracking task. Data are presented from illustrative samples of spontaneous speech; thus, evidence was found to suggest that one level of planning in speech is clauses that contain a single main verb. Evidence was also obtained that there is an increase in processing demands at the gap in subject relative and object relative clauses. It is concluded that the secondary tracking task is a useful technique that could be extended to studies of reading and speech comprehension.