The Limited Use of Distinctive Features and Markedness in Speech Production: Evidence from Speech Error Data.

Analysis of a phoneme confusion matrix consisting of 1620 spontaneous speech errors shows that each consonant segment appears as an intrusion just about as often as it appears as a target, with the exception of a small set of four segments (/s//t//s//c/) for which there is a target-intrusion asymmetry in the direction of more frequent “palatalizing” errors. With this qualification, it is shown that there is no tendency for linguistically unmarked consonants to replace marked consonants. It is also shown that sound segment errors almost always involve the movement of unitary segments and not the movement of component distinctive features. These results, confirmed in an independently collected corpus of 1369 errors, are compatible with a model of the speech production process in which (1) most phoneme errors occur as the result of a mis-selection between two similar planning segments competing for a single location in an utterance, although (2) voiceless alveolar consonants are subject to a palatalizing mechanism which is the source of further segmental errors.