Unit 4: Normal speech errors and how they happen: Saying words and

sounds in the right order

4.0.MAKING PHRASES AND SENTENCES IN A FEW TENTHS OF A SECOND

The grand canyon went to my sister

I will cut your knife with my neck
Hey joke, have you heard the Mike about?

These errors are not about substituting with an unintended words belonging to the same semantic
category, these are word order errors, with the wrong semantic role.

4.1.1. HEROES, CASCADES, AND BUFFERS (important)

Not all the lemmas that we need to make a sentence are activated at the same time. The concepts
that are activated strongly (For example our concept for the people we have a strong relation with)
activate faster in the message level and their lemma activate in the functional level sooner.

This idea of lemmas that do not wait for each other to be activated before the sentence we want to
say leaves the message level is part of CASCADE MODEL of processing.

Cascade processing means that, when the activation for any step of processing a particular concept,
event, or lemma comes faster than others, it starts to send activation to the next step of its
production, regardless of whether other items at the same level are ready to go or not.

We say that if an item is activated before it can be used in the sentence together with other items, it
is temporarily maintained in a waiting place, a BUFFER. If an item is activated but cannot yet be
put into the sentence, we will say that it is in a buffer.

In our model, getting the words of a sentence into their order happens at the third level
organization: the POSITIONAL LEVEL.

When the right words for the sentence go into the wrong order, the Positional level has been
constructed incorrectly, either because of switched tags at the Functional Level, or because
phonological word forms activated by correctly tagged lemmas get put into the wrong places at the
Positional Level.

Errors where the right words go in the wrong order, are not particularly common in people with
language disorders; they seem to be the kind of thing that happens when skilled normal speakers get
to talking too fast.

In language learners, these processes will be in primitive shape until they know the grammar. You
have a lot of lemmas in a buffer, and you know their semantic roles, but you cannot use that
information to construct the Positional Level, so all the lemmas can do is activate their word forms.

To communicate without syntax, you use gesture, facial expressions, and prosody: You point, raise
your eyebrows, and use the pitch of your voice to indicate requests and questions, Newspaper,
please. Phone card? That one, How much? No Positional Level, no syntax.

4.1.2. SLOTS AND FILLERS

We say that the Positional Level has a SLOT for each word, a slot where each lemma is supposed to
send the phonological form that it activates. Each phonological form has to be put into the right
slot. But, the lemma tags were semantic and said nothing about the syntax or the actual order of the
words. So how does the proper order get computed? And what about those lemmas waiting
impatiently in the buffer?

4.1.3. FORMULAS AND CLICHS: PREFAB WORD SEQUENCES (WITH A FEW

OPTIONS) REDUCE CONSTRUCTION COSTS (important)

FORMULAS: sequences of words with a slot or two for and additional word that you can choose.
Good examples are politeness formulas like May I please have some (more) [name of food/drink],
standard information questions like Are we at [name of destination] yet? And more complex
formulas. Other examples the formula are: Whats up?; LikeSup?

Children use many of these formulas early because of their frequency; second-language learners
find them extremely useful to memorize because they help one sound more fluent; and for people
with some kinds of aphasia; they may be among the few fluent word sequences that they can
produce.

4.2. ERRORS IN WORD-MAKING: WORD-ASSSEMBLY CRASHES

errors involving parts of words, morphemes.
4.2.1. AFFIXES ON THE LOOSE

Errors involving, suffixes, prefixes and infixes, for example:

-a language needer learns (target: a language learner needs) Exchange error

-Easy enoughly (target: easily enough) Exchange error
-Monentaneous (target: momentary/instantaneous) Blend of two similar expressions you wanted
to say at the same time

These errors are normal in Speakers of any language. We are not going to enter in details but these
two-morpheme words like learner, needs, or easily are stored in two parts, learn and er, need and
s; easy and ly; and that these parts are linked together and if something goes wrong they can
be unlinked. If a word has three morphemes, it will be the same. Like a train.

The speaker s language-producing mechanism must have also known that it was looking for a
verb to put before the er suffix. The lemmas NEED and LEARN were both activated, and
somehow need jumped into that verb slot in front of the er suffix instead of waiting in the buffer
for its proper place before the s suffix.

Affix errors are important in clinical and classroom settings: Speakers with aphasia often leave off
suffix morphemes that are needed, or use the wrong ones. And first and second language learners
often have particular trouble learning certain kinds of affix morphemes.

4.3. ERRORS IN WORD SOUNDS: A HERRIBLE MESS AT THE LEVEL OF

PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING OR A FOUL-UP IN ARTICULATION? (important)

4.1.3. Errors in word sounds: A horrible mess at the level of phonological encoding or a foul-
up in articulation?

1. Odd hack (target: ad hoc) Exchange of vowel 3.smuck in the tid (target stick in the mud)
2. naif lait (target night life) exchanges of consonant segment
Whats important about these errors is, how neat they are. They create nonwords that obey English
phonotactic patterns, and most of the time, a sound moves from its place in the target syllable to a
very similar kind of place in the error syllable. These are errors in planning the order of sounds in a
word or phrase, not in articulating the sounds; articulation happens at the final stage in
production, the Speech Gesture Level, after a phrase has been fully planned.

Psycholinguistic models for how sounds get into the wrong places are similar to the used for errors
in the placement of words or morphemes, but in our production level, these exchanges have to
happen after the Positional Level. At the Positional Level, word stems seem to be some kind of
block of phonological information.

The level at which all the sounds for all of the morphemes have been activated in the lexicon is
called the PHONOLOGICAL ENCONDING LEVEL. It is the level of production after the
positional level, in this level, the phonemes of the words have been activated so the form of regular
affixes can be chosen.

The order of the sounds in a word in very important to transmit the information and to produce it,
psycholinguists call these complete activated forms ORDERED STRINGS OF PHONEMES.

The errors of exchange and blending are explained by saying that these ordered strings of
phonemes, after they have been activated by their lemmas, have to wait in a phonological
BUFFER until we produce the phrase, word or sentence. So we could think of the Level of
Phonological Encoding as the phonological buffer level. When all goes well, each phoneme
comes out in the right order, but phonological errors happen when one of the phonemes is too
strongly activated and pushed into the wrong place, or is too weakly activated and gets abandoned
in the buffer.
From the Positional Level to the Phonological Encoding Level

The lemma activates the phonemes in the form of the word stem: the word stem, plus the
grammatical information to choose inflectional affixes, is what we have at the completion of the
POSITIONAL LEVEL.

This information activates the phonemes in the complete word, which go to the
PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING LEVEL, which is a phonological buffer. In the buffer, the
phonemes line up in the order to choose which allophone of each phoneme will be produced.

In aphasic people we have to distinguish if when there is a problem in pronunciation regarding

phonemes they have problems with the phonological level or with the speech gesture level (muscles
etc). If the aphasic persons speech sound errors are always clearly articulated, that means they
have problems at the Phonological Encoding level, and not at the Speech Gesture Level.

4.3.2. PHONETIC SOUND ERRORS: HITTING AND ARTICULATORY TARGET

SPEECH GESTURE, it is the level in which the complex sets of muscle movements get
coordinated to make each sound, and the ways that skilled speakers automatically make alterations
in these movements the COARTICULATION process- so that each articulation flows smoothly.
Lips, tongue, jaw, throat , and diaphragm

From the Phonological Encoding Level to the Speech Gesture Level

The phonemes in the complete word are lined up in the phonological buffer at the
PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING LEVEL. They line up in order, if all goes well. This order starts
to determine which allophone of each phoneme will be produced.

The lined-up phonemes activates the neurons that send information to the muscles needed to
produce the articulatory gesture: this is the SPEECH GESTURE LEVEL. Coarticulation happens
when any of the gesture needed to make one speech sound are being made at the same time as
gestures for another speech sound.

Some of these errors may be caused by gestures that over or undershoot their articulatory target, for
example, producing a sound that combines [p] and [f] when the target is one or the other of those
sounds.

4.4. DOUBLE WHAMMIES AND WORSE: MULTIPLE-SOURCE ERRORS VERSUS--

SELF-MONITORING

You have probably had the experience of realizing that you are about to make a speech error but
being able to stop it before actually saying it. Having enough awareness to stop your errors before
they get to Speech Gesture Level is called SELF-MONITORING; it takes attention and effort, so
we do not it well when we are tired or thinking about something else. People with aphasia often
seem to be making multiple-source errors.