The tongue slips into (recently learned) patterns

Abstract

Speech errors reflect linguistic knowledge. For example, phonological errors follow languagewide phonotactic constraints such as the fact that [h] must be an onset in English. We review five experimental studies that demonstrate that errors adhere to artificial experiment-wide constraints (e.g. [f] must be an onset during this experiment) as well as language-wide constraints. These studies show that the language production system adapts to its recent experience with phonological patterns.