Effects of phonological competition on speech planning and execution

Competition between phonologically similar sequences in an utterance is one of the major causes for speech production errors. Additionally, phonological competition has been found to increase planning time and slow down speech rate in CVC word pairs. The aims of this study are to investigate the timecourse of phonological competition by employing different tasks and by a detailed gestural analysis. Effects of competition in the onset ("top cop" and “pay Kay”) are compared to competition in the coda (e.g. "top tock") and both were compared to sequences of identical words (e.g. "top top"). Results from three studies are reported: acoustic latencies from a delayed naming task and a simple naming task (18 speakers), and articulatory latencies from a delayed naming task using EMA (6 speakers). Reaction time was affected by competition but not by locus. Mismatch in the coda lengthened the execution time most prominently in the final rime.