Analysis of 1500 phonetic errors in spontaneous speech

Fifteen hundred phonetic substitution errors were collected from spontaneous conversations of adult native speakers of English and formed into a confusion matrix of target versus intrusion phonemes. The matrix was analyzed using several methods for evidence of distinctive feature constraints on substitution patterns. Results are compared with evidence from studies of phoneme confusions in perception and in short‐term memory. For many features, a substitution in the consonant matrix is significantly more likely to preserve the feature value of the target than would be expected by chance, suggesting that at some point in the production process, segments are represented psychologically in terms of features. The matrix formed by vowel substitutions, although smaller, also supports a traditional feature analysis, but the distinction between front and back vowels is often lost in substitutions. Other constraints which emerge from the error matrix include a sharp distinction between consonants and vowels, and li...