Slips of the Tongue as Linguistic Evidence: Finnish Word Initial Segments and Vowel Harmony

Abstract

Hypotheses for two pervasive phonological features of Finnish were assessed through slips of the tongue. Psycholinguistic (external) evidence supporting these hypotheses has until now been gained solely from language games (secret languages). In general, the language game data have shown that Finnish word-initial syllables are segmented after the first vowel segment (CV hypothesis) and that the wordforms created by the games conform to the palatal vowel harmony of the language (naturalness of harmony hypothesis). In the present study we seek to determine whether similar evidence is to be found from spontaneous slips of the tongue. This search is motivated by the fact that language games rely on principles that are different from those of subdoxastic input/output representations and processes which should be the focus of a linguist's attention. In spite of the differences in the causal mechanisms between the data-sources compared, our analyses of three independent slip corpora support the view that the onset plus the first nuclear segment (i.e. CV) form a word-initial subsyllabic unit in Finnish. Moreover, the palatal harmony is shown to be persistent in slips as well as in language games