Phonetic Feature Errors are Predominantly Anticipatory

While segments are the smallest perceivable unit of speech, they consist of smaller units called features. In speech production, feature errors can be difficult to distinguish from segment errors. In the production ‘she sells sheashells...’ it is difficult to tell if the erroneous ‘sh’ is a slip of the feature for place (alveolar ‘s’ becoming postalveolar ‘sh’), or a slip of the entire segment ‘sh’. Possibly due to this difficulty in interpretation, feature errors are thought to be rare and not a significant unit in speech planning. Guest (2002) found that feature errors can be induced and that they behave similarly to segment errors. The following reports on an experiment that replicates Guest’s results and extends his findings to include evidence that feature errors are predominantly anticipatory assimilations, as is claimed for segment errors (Dell, Burger & Svec, 1997).