Stages in sentence production: An analysis of speech error data

Abstract

The hypothesis that sentence production is organized into independent positional and functional stages is tested using speech error data. Contrary to predictions from the hypothesis it was found that sound misordering errors tend to create words and that word errors, such as substitutions and misorderings, tend to involve similar sounding words. In addition, it was found that incorrectly substituted words often show both a semantic and phonological relationship to the intended words. A proposal regarding the stages of production is developed that accounts for the results. It is assumed that information can leak between stages by way of the mental lexicon and cause the decision making at a given stage to be affected in a probabilistic manner by information from other stages.