Nasal consonant speech errors: Implications for ‘‘similarity’’ and nasal harmony at a distance (original) (raw)

It has been observed that nasals interact with ‘‘similar’’ consonants in phonological long distance nasal harmony [Walker, BLS 26, 321–332 (2000)]. In such patterns, nasals cause other consonants in a word to become nasal. Voiced stops and liquids are preferentially affected; in some cases obligatorily homorganic with the nasal. In this study we ask whether a parallel occurs in consonants with greater likelihood to participate in speech errors with nasals; specifically, is preferred interaction of voiced and homorganic stops with nasals also evident in the error pattern of a language without nasal harmony? Experiments were conducted on English speakers using the SLIPS technique [Baars and Motley, Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 1974]. CVC word pairs were presented for reading. Critical pairs, primed to encourage initial consonant errors, were cued to be spoken. Experiment 1 (35 subjects) investigated whether more errors involve nasals and voiced stops than nasals and vo...