Tongue Kinematics during Utterances Elicited with the SLIP Technique

Abstract

In the past years, there have been an increasing number of instrumental investigations as to the nature of speech production errors, prompted by the concern that decades of transcription-based speech error data may be tainted by perceptual biases. While all of these instrumental studies suggest that errors are not, as previously thought, necessarily a matter of all-or-none, it is unclear what implications these studies have for phonological encoding as a cognitive process. Due to their repetition-based design, the ill-formed errors obtained in these studies may be articulation errors rather than cognitive planning errors. The present study reports for the first time tongue movement data collected during an error elicitation study based on the SLIP technique, which has traditionally been hypothesized to elicit errors at the phonological planning level. Results indicate that tongue kinematics during errors in the present task are comparable to those found in errorful utterances in repetition tasks. The findings are interpreted within a dynamic model of speech production as errors in phasing between the interacting consonant gestures.