The so-called syllable position effect in speech errors has been interpreted as reflecting constraints posed by the frame structure of a given language, which is separately operating from linguistic content during speech production. The effect refers to the phenomenon that when a speech error occurs, replaced and replacing sounds tend to be in the…

Four picture-description experiments investigated if syntactic formulation in language production can proceed with only minimal working memory involvement. Experiments 1-3 compared the initiation latencies, utterance durations, and errors for syntactically simpler picture descriptions (adjective-noun phrases, e.g., "the red book") to…

We compare the predictions of two different accounts of first language acquisition by investigating the relative contributions of abstract syntax and input frequency to the elicited production of main and embedded questions by 36 monolingual English-speaking toddlers aged 3;00 to 5;11. In particular, we investigate whether children's accuracy…

Syntactic structure has been considered an integral component of agreement computation in language production. In agreement error studies, clause-boundedness (Bock & Cutting, 1992) and hierarchical feature-passing (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002) predict that local nouns within clausal modifiers should produce fewer errors than do those within…

Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge…

This study examined the existence of an object omission stage and the interaction between object omissions and substitution errors in the early stages of the development of Spanish syntax. One hundred and three Spanish-speaking children from Colombia completed an elicitation task evaluating the production of direct object pronouns. Results…

This study has investigated the interlanguage features in spoken language of four foreigner learners of Bangla. Data has been collected through interviews which were recorded and analyzed. The analysis of the respondents' language has been made in terms of phonetic, morphological and syntactic aspects. The language deviations may be attributed to…

Reviews psycholinguistic theories on the relationship between structure and function in language production. Criticizes the theory that sentence structures are reducible to the general forces of cognition that drive interpretation and communication. Argues that syntactic structures are necessary elements in an explanation of language use. (FMW)

This paper studies the reliability and validity of naturalistic speech errors as a tool for language production research. Possible biases when collecting naturalistic speech errors are identified and specific predictions derived. These patterns are then contrasted with published reports from Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) and one…

Describes ongoing research into errors in spontaneous speech. (RM)

Reports on an experiment to check whether the use of articles by Italian preschool children corresponds to that of their English counterparts and on a second experiment to investigate the probability that subjects might produce the correct response distribution by following a rule based on the speaker's familiarity with the referent, not the…

A phoneme confusion matrix consisting of 1,620 spontaneous speech errors was analyzed. It is shown that there is no tendency for linguistically unmarked consonants to replace marked consonants and that sound segment errors almost always involve the movement of unitary segments and not the movement of component distinctive features. (SW)

Presents an analysis of German learners' pragmatic errors in English, based on their use of speech acts and gambits. (AM)

An observable feature of learner language, linguistic variability, is described and used as the basis for speculating about an aspect of the process of second language learning. It is hypothesized that variation in correct use of target language forms varies as a function of the demands placed on the learner to produce these forms. Three groups of…

Evaluates competing proposals for the underspecification of phonological representations against the facts of phonemic acquisition. Results indicate that context-sensitive radical underspecification provides a plausible account of each developmental stage and the transition between stages with minimal grammar change. (36 references) (Author/CK)