Phonetic trace effects in experimentally-induced vowel errors

Speech errors in typical and atypical populations provide an important empirical foundation for theories of speech production and their neural bases. Studies of consonant speech errors have provided important evidence for cascading activation, c.f. categorical selection, across linguistic representations. Specifically, consonant errors show a phonetic trace effect whereby the phonetic details of the errorful consonant retain an influence of the intended sound. In this paper, we extend an experimental paradigm for speech error elicitation to vowels. Results show that vowel errors are similar to consonants in that errors differ systematically from their canonical (non-error) counterparts on the dimensions of primary control in articulation, as indexed by formant measures. We also found that vowel errors were not consistently different from canonical productions on the dimension of duration. We discuss the implications of these results for models that implement cascading activation to relate speech output to higher levels of language production.