Eliminating the Segmental Tier: Evidence from Speech Errors

The dominant viewpoint regarding phonologically driven speech errors is that segments are the units responsible behind the errors. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the point that other potential candidates for explaining these speech errors, which have gone largely unnoticed, provide a better explanatory framework for speech errors than do segments. By looking at unambiguous cases and patterns of markedness, it can be shown that there exists good evidence for features and prosodic constituents in speech errors, but never any positive evidence for segments. All of these considerations taken into account together lend strong support to the argument that there is no need for a segmental level of analysis in phonology.