Cross-Linguistic Trends in Speech Errors: An Analysis of Sub-Lexical Errors in Cantonese

Abstract

Though past research on the sound structure of speech errors has contributed greatly to our understanding of phonological encoding, most of this research comes from a small set of majority languages with similar linguistic structures. To increase the linguistic diversity of relevant evidence, a large collection of speech errors was investigated in Cantonese, an under-studied language with unique phonological structures. In particular, the Cantonese data were examined for nine psycholinguistic effects commonly used as a lens on word-form encoding. Detailed quantitative analysis found that Cantonese has eight of these effects, providing broader cross-linguistic support for models based on these patterns. Yet Cantonese also exhibited differences with well-known Indo-European languages by having a higher rate of errors involving whole syllables and sub-constituents inside the syllable rime. These differences can be accounted for by recognizing the primacy of the syllable and mora in encoding Cantonese words, following proposals that have been made for Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.

Keywords: Cantonese; Speech errors; language production; linguistic diversity; mora; phonological encoding; similarity; syllables.

Figure 1.

Form encoding with syllable as proximate unit in Mandarin (from O’Seaghdha et al., 2010).