Syllable
Errors from Naturalistic Slips of the Tongue in Mandarin Chinese
J.-Y. Chen |
The
question of whether a syllable constitutes a planning unit in speech
production was investigated with naturalistic slips of the tongue
in Mandarin Chinese. The corpus was 120 tape-recorded radio programs,
each lasting 40 minutes long. It contained approximately 960,000
words and 1314 errors, an error rate of 1 error per 730 words. Among
these, 191 were contextual sound errors. To avoid ambiguity in interpretation,
a syllable movement error was defined as one in which the target
and the source syllable do not share the tone or any syllable constituents
and the source syllable moves without carrying its tone with it.
Altogether, there were 10 such errors in the corpus, seven anticipatory,
two perseverative, and one exchange. Four syllable movement errors
were also independently reported by Shen (1992). The probability
that the ten errors in our corpus were the result of the syllables
slipping far exceeds the probability that they were the result of
the syllable constituents (e.g., initial and final) simultaneously
and independently slipping. It is concluded that the syllable in
Mandarin Chinese is represented and processed as a planning unit
in the form of a stored chunk. This contrasts with the dominant view
of the syllable's role in English. Several explanations are offered
to account for the differential findings in English and in Mandarin
Chinese. Recent thoughts and experimental studies on syllables and
their relevance to the present study are also discussed. Key words: speech production, Mandarin Chinese, syllable, slips of the tongue |