The prosody of speech error corrections revisited

Abstract

An analysis of corrected speech errors from a taped corpus addressed the difficult case of errors ambiguous between a phonetic and a lexical source (e.g. "Keep Tar -- Car Talk on the air", which could be an anticipation of /t/ or a word substitution). Peak F0 of the error and of the correction were measured (e.g. of "Tar" and "Car" in the example), and the difference between the two measures calculated. The results showed that, as in previous studies, word errors are more likely than sound errors to differ in error and correction prosody. In their correction prosody, the ambiguous errors strongly resembled sound errors and not word errors. We propose that ambiguous errors are sound errors which by chance have produced a word. It has sometimes been argued that such errors provide evidence of leakage between levels of processing in speech production; this claim is however not motivated.