Counterfeit tones in the speech of Southern Thai bidialectals

Abstract Evidence from tone errors produced by Southern Thai bidialectals reveals that the disordering mechanisms (perseveration, anticipation, transposition) that have been proposed to handle consonant and vowel errors may be extended without modification to tone errors. The tone errors further reflect or support the independence of tone features and some proposed universals regarding tone rules. Although some of the tone errors may be directly attributed to ‘dialect interference’, the majority of errors are better explained in terms of more general physiological and/or perceptual factors (among others) that may intrude in the production of an utterance.