Pronoun 1

LAN GUAGE AN D SPEECH, 1999, 42 (1), 57– 82 57
The “Tongue Twister” Paradigm as a

Technique for Studying Phonological
Encoding*
CAROLYN E. WILSHIRE
University of Cambridge, U.K.
KEY WORDS ABSTRACT

phonological The “tongue twister” paradigm is underutilized as a research tool because
encoding so little is known about how it induces errors. The two experiments reported
here explore this paradigm in detail using a task variation which minimizes
phonological errors articulatory and mnemonic load. This task was found to elicit good rates of
apparently “pure” prearticulatory errors. Two of its features had a significant
psycholinguistics error-inducing effect: a) repeated reiteration; and b) the use of similar
phonemes in targets (e.g., moss knife noose muff). The presence of phoneme
speech errors
repeats (e.g., palm neck name pack) had no reliable overall effect, but did
speech production influence error distribution. Performance on the task differed in several ways
from that observed on a control task with similar output demands, but no
speech production— reiterative component. A model of the task is proposed, in which phoneme
methods similarity and reiteration are seen as independent contributors to the task’s
error-inducing potential. Wider theoretical implications of certain results
tongue twisters are also discussed.
INTRODUCTION
Current theories of language production identify a stage during speech planning at which
a lexically /morphologically defined representation of the intended utterance is converted
into one which is fully phonologically specified. The process by which this occurs is often
referred to as “phonological encoding.” Until recently, the major source of empirical
information concerning this process was collections of spontaneously-occurring phono-
logical “slips of the tongue” (see e.g., Fromkin, 1971; Garnham, Shillcock, Brown, Mill,
& Cutler, 1981; Garrett, 1975; Nooteboom, 1969). However, now that a number of detailed
* Acknowledgments: The research reported here was conducted while the author was a doctoral
student at the Department of Experiment Psychology, University of Cambridge. Her research
was supported by a St. John’s College Benefactor’s Research Studentship. She would like to thank
Di Bradley for providing the initial inspiration for this work, Roz McCarthy for valuable advice
during the design and running of the experiments, and Geoff Stuart for assistance and advice
with statistical analyses. Thanks also to Ellen Gurman Bard, John Ohala and an anonymous
reviewer for helpful comments on the manuscript.
Address for correspondence: Carolyn Wilshire, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department
of Neurology, Temple University School of Medicine, 3401 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19140,
U.S.A. Fax:+1 215 7077843. Email: cwilshir@nimbus.ocis.temple.edu
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY on May 28, 2015
58 Tongue twisters and phonological encoding
models of phonological encoding have been formulated (see e.g., Dell, 1986, 1988; Levelt,
1989, 1992; MacKay, 1987; Roelofs, 1997; Stemberger, 1985, 1990), there is an increasing
need for empirical methods which can test more specific hypotheses about particular contro-
versial or unresolved issues (see also Meyer, 1992, for discussion). For this purpose,
alternative empirical techniques are required which permit the direct manipulation of
specific speech variables. One promising technique which has so far received relatively
little attention is the tongue twister paradigm, in which phonological errors are induced
artificially by taking advantage of the features inherent in “tongue twisters.” This has the
advantage that it generates both quantitative and qualitative information, and can be used
to test a wide range of empirical questions.
The tongue twister paradigm involves reciting a word string several times over at a
fast rate. Usually the target itself also includes features found in tongue twisters, such as
combinations of similar phonemes and /or phoneme repeats (e.g., the chef’s sooty shoe soles:
Schwartz, Saffran, Bloch, & Dell, 1994), or perhaps ABBA phoneme arrangements (e.g.,
leap note nap lute: Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1983, 1987, 1992). This paradigm has so far been
used to test a number of hypotheses, including: a) whether combinations of similar phonemes
increase the likelihood of error (e.g., Butterworth & Whittaker, 1980; Kupin, 1982; Levitt
& Healy, 1985); b) whether the rate of speech influences errors (Kupin, 1982; MacKay,
1982); c) whether the degree of “phrasality” of strings influences their proneness to errors
(e.g., Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1987); and d) whether there are qualitative changes in errors with
practice (Dell & Repka, 1992; Schwartz, Saffran, Bloch, & Dell, 1994). All have found in
the affirmative. But the potential of the technique for testing further hypotheses is far
greater than this: not only can the phonological composition of the targets themselves be
manipulated in a myriad of ways, but so too can their suprasegmental qualities (e.g., length,
stress, lexical status), the properties of the strings themselves (whether long or short, whether
meaningful or not), and the conditions under which the utterances are elicited (e.g., the rate
of speech). Further, the task can potentially be adapted to suit specific subject populations
(see e.g., Wilshire & McCarthy, 1996).
Why has the tongue twister paradigm not received more attention in the literature?
One possible reason is that we still have a relatively poor understanding of how the task is
accomplished, and how it induces errors. This is a concern for a number of reasons. Firstly,
there is increasing evidence that phonological errors may be influenced in subtle ways by
some of the features frequently incorporated into such paradigms. For example, Dell and
colleagues (Dell, 1986; Dell, Burger, & Svec, 1997) have demonstrated that variables such
as speech rate not only influence the overall incidence of errors, but also have an effect on
the kind of errors obtained — most notably, whether they are anticipatory or perseveratory.
Similarly, there is evidence that repeated use of the same phonemes — as often occurs in
tongue twisters — can increase the tendency for errors to result in the creation of real
words (Stemberger, 1985, 1992) and /or alter the distribution of errors across words (Sevald
& Dell, 1994). A second concern is that some error-inducing features might influence
processes at levels other than those being specifically studied, so that the error corpus may
contain errors originating from sources other than phonological encoding. For example, if
the speaking rate is very fast, this may interfere with the speaker’s ability to program
and /or execute the motor commands necessary for correct articulation (see Laver, 1980,
for evidence that errors induced using very fast rates of speech may be determined more
C. E. Wilshire 59
by articulatory /neuromuscular factors than by phonemic planning factors). The result may
be gross articulatory reductions and /or gestural blends, many of which may sound like
“phonological” errors (see Buckingham & Yule, 1987, for some evidence from aphasic
speech that articulatory errors may sometimes be misperceived as higher-level phonological
errors). Thirdly, some researchers are uncertain how the cognitive operations engaged in
the tongue twister task relate to those involved in producing spontaneous speech, and
therefore are cautious in extending findings from this paradigm to models of “spontaneous”
phonological encoding.
Nevertheless, it is possible to address many of these concerns through careful analysis
of the task itself. Direct manipulation and investigation of the task’s various components
can enable us to build up a detailed picture as to how the task is accomplished by speakers,
and how it induces errors. Moreover, this kind of investigation may also provide a great
deal of theoretically interesting information in its own right, as some features frequently
incorporated into tongue twisters are associated with direct theoretical predictions. For
example, the inclusion of similar phonemes in the target string is predicted by a number
of models to increase the likelihood of errors. In Shattuck-Hufnagel (1979, 1983), distinctive
feature information is one of the criteria which guides the segmental sequencing process,
so that a misordering error is more likely when two elements share much of this information.
Similarly, in models which permit bottom-up as well as top-down processing during speech
production (e.g., Dell, 1986, 1988; Stemberger, 1985, 1990), feedback from subphonemic
levels of processing flows back to the phonological level, thereby increasing competition
between similar phonemes, and thus their likelihood of error. The use of phoneme repeats
is also the subject of theoretical predictions, this time differing somewhat across models.
Some models predict a detrimental effect of phoneme repeats: for example, according to
Shattuck-Hufnagel (1979, 1983), phoneme repeats may “trick” phonologically-sensitive
editing mechanisms into thinking an encoding error has been made, thereby inducing an
inappropriate edit. And in Stemberger’s (1985, 1990) network model, a recently accessed
phoneme undergoes a period of inhibition after its selection, which temporarily decreases
its availability for reselection. In contrast, however, some models predict the opposite: In
the network models of Dell and colleagues (e.g., Dell, 1986, 1988; Sevald & Dell, 1994),
the period of “postaccess inhibition” is so small as to be virtually negligible, and is directly
followed by a period of reactivation. So a recently-uttered phoneme may actually be more
easily accessible than one not recently produced.
The current study investigates in detail a number of important components of a typical
tongue twister task, and assesses the relative contribution of each to the task’s error-inducing
potential. The study directly investigates: a) repeated reiteration of the string; b) the inclusion
of similar phonemes in the target string; and c) the use of multiple instances of phonemes
in target strings. The particular tongue twister task used here is based on one originally
developed by Shattuck-Hufnagel (1983, 1987, 1992), in which strings of four words (e.g.,
leap note nap lute) must be recited several times over at a controlled pace. This task is
ideal as it incorporates many “classic” error-inducing features, each of which can be
manipulated independently — including similar phonemes, phoneme repeats, as well as the
characteristic “ABBA” phoneme arrangements often present in tongue twisters (e.g., She
sells sea shells; see Schourup, 1973). However, unlike in Shattuck-Hufnagel’s original task,
where word strings had to be recited from memory, the task was modified here so that the
written sequence was constantly on display. Also, the rate of speech was kept constant
with the use of a metronome — set at a rate which imposes some time pressure, but still
allows plenty of time for motor planning and articulation. These modifications were made
to minimize the likelihood that misarticulations and recall failures would contribute substan-
tially to the error corpus.
Two experiments are reported. Experiment 1 investigates the separate effects of the
features of the target sequence itself: the presence of similar phonemes and multiple
instances of the same phoneme. Findings from this experiment establish this adaptation of
the tongue twister task as effective in eliciting errors. They indicate that phoneme similarity
plays a significant role in inducing errors, though they do not securely establish a role for
phoneme repetition. Experiment 2 then examines the role played by reiteration: The tongue
twister task is compared with an alternative multiple word production task which does not
require en bloc reiteration of a fixed target string. Findings from this experiment indicate
that the error-inducing effect of repeatedly reciting the target string is not just due to
increased phonological overload or fatigue from sustained production, but is instead due
to specific aspects of the way target sequences are planned and reiterated during production.
EXPERIMENT 1:
EFFECTS OF TARGET PHONOLOGICAL COMPOSITION
Experiment 1 investigates whether a) the presence of highly similar phoneme pairs, and b)
repeated instances of the same phonemes, contribute to the error-eliciting potential of the
tongue twister paradigm, and if so, to what extent. Previous studies have found in the
affirmative for both factors; however, many of these are difficult to interpret due to the
methodologies used. For example, while a number of studies have obtained positive effects
of phoneme similarity (e.g., Butterworth & Whittaker, 1980; Kupin, 1982; Levitt & Healy,
1985), all of these used very fast speech rates; in Butterworth and Whittaker (1980),
targets were recited “as fast as possible,” and in Kupin (1982), at a rate of 3 to 3.5
syllables /sec. Thus, there remains the concern that many of the errors may be articulatory
failures resulting from subjects’ inability to program and /or execute articulatory motor
commands in the time available. If this were the case, then the similarity effects obtained
might simply reflect articulatory factors (e.g., the fact that similar sequences are likely to
load particularly heavily on a small number of muscle groups, and to overlap heavily in
their reliance on certain motor programs). They may tell us very little about the role of
subphonemic information during higher-level phonological planning.
A similar problem exists in studies which have looked at the effects of phoneme
repeats. Recently, Sevald and Dell (1994) have examined this issue using a paradigm
which requires extremely fast production of word sequences such as pick pun puck pin.
These authors obtained complex effects of phoneme repetition, depending upon the position
of the repeating phonemes within their host words (repeats of word-initial consonants
increased error rates and production latencies, while repeats of word-final consonants
decreased these measures). Again, however, the experimental paradigm required a very fast
rate of production, and it is possible that the results may have reflected the load placed on
articulatory programming and /or execution at least as much as it did that placed on phono-
logical encoding processes. And since the position of a repeated phoneme within its host
C. E. Wilshire 61
word may have a direct effect on its articulatory difficulty,1 this alone might explain the
positional effects observed by these authors. It would therefore be extremely useful to
investigate the role of both phoneme similarity and repetition within the context of a slower-
paced production task, in which the potential contribution of articulator y factors is
minimized.
Experiment 1 examines the separate effects of phoneme similarity and repetition on
error rates (overall accuracy and rates of consonant errors) using the simple four-word
tongue twister task described earlier. In this task, the target string is constantly on display,
and subjects recite it at the rate of 100 words per minute (i.e., 1.67 syllables per second).
This rate is considerably slower than estimates for spontaneous speech (estimated at between
2.50 and 4.56 syllables per second, depending on length of phonological phrase: Fónagy
& Magdics, 1960). Even given the unusual prosodic structure of our target sequences —
they are composed entirely of stressed, closed syllables — it is unlikely that it imposed any
real-time limitations on articulator movement or motor programming. To examine the effect
of phoneme repetition, a condition in which quadruples do not contain repeats (e.g., case
port bed moon) is compared with one in which phonemes are repeated across words at
both word-initial and word-final positions but where there are no other specific error-
inducing features (e.g., palm neck name pack). These repeating sequences use alternating
repeats of two target phonemes, rather than consistent repeats of a single target, with the
alternations either in ABAB or ABBA order (these were counterbalanced so that in half
the items, word-initial phonemes appeared in ABBA order, and word-final phonemes in
ABAB order: e.g., palm neck name pack, moss knife noose muff; and the other half had the
converse pattern: e.g., soap dam seam dip, purse cat pot case). Local effects of these
different repetition patterns are also examined.
The effect of phoneme similarity is investigated by including one further repeating
condition in which phonemes in corresponding word positions are also highly similar
(e.g., word-initial /m/ and /n/ and word-final /f/ and /s/ in moss knife noose muff). An
empirically-motivated definition of “similarity” is used, based on the rates at which the
various phonemes replace one another in spontaneous errors. However, post hoc correla-
tions are also performed using a more traditional, featural definition of similarity.
Method
Subjects. The subjects were twelve native speakers of British English aged between 40 and
69. Six were aged between 40 and 59, and the other six between 60 and 69. They came from
a range of domestic, technical, and trades backgrounds. Subjects were reimbursed for their
participation.
1
Articulator movements associated with word-final consonants tend to “spread” to the preceding
vowel, whereas those associated with word-initial consonants tend to be temporally more discrete
(see e.g., Ladefoged, 1982; Sproat & Fujimura, 1993). Therefore, a sequence of words featuring
the same prevocalic consonant but different postvocalic consonants (e.g., pit pick pit pick) may be
more difficult to articulate than the reverse (e.g., tip kip tip kip) simply because alternations of final
consonants require more widespread changes to articulator values than alternations of initial
consonants.
TABLE 1
Summary of the types of items used in Experiment 1
Item Type n Description Example
Control 32 phonemes used only once in case port bed moon

each word position type cough peat sack
Alliterating 16 phonemes repeated in same palm neck name pack
/Dissimilar word position; (Initial ABBA /final ABAB order)
phonemes in corresponding soap dam seam dip
word positions dissimilar (Initial ABAB/final ABBA order)
Alliterating 16 phonemes repeated in same moss knife noose muff
/Similar word position; (Initial ABBA /final ABAB order)
phonemes in corresponding purse cat pot case
word positions similar (Initial ABAB/final ABBA order)
Materials. Stimuli consisted of 64 CVC word quadruples. Thirty-two of these were “Control”
quadruples, in which no consonant in any given word position was repeated (e.g., case port
bed moon). A further 16 were “Alliterating /Dissimilar” quadruples, which contained allit-
erations of consonants in corresponding word positions, but in which contrasting consonants
in the same position were those rarely confused spontaneously — in less than ten instances
each within the Shattuck-Hufnagel and Klatt (1979) matrix of spontaneous substitutions
(e.g., /p/ vs. /n/ in palm neck name pack). The remaining 16 quadruples were “Alliterating /
Similar”: These again contained phoneme alliterations, but here pairs of consonants in corre-
sponding positions were those frequently confused — in more than ten instances in the
Shattuck-Hufnagel /Klatt matrix (e.g., /m/ vs. /n/ in moss knife noose muff). Pairs which
contrasted in voicing only were not used (due to the possible asymmetric effects of the voicing
feature at different word positions: Wilshire, 1985), nor were “unidirectional” pairs, in which
one phoneme replaced the other at least twice as frequently as vice-versa. In order to control
for possible differences in the difficulty of individual phoneme pairs, both
Alliterating /Dissimilar and Alliterating /Similar items were constructed so that each phoneme
pair appeared an equal number of times in word-initial and word-final positions (e.g., the
pair /f / -/s / appears once in initial position, in the item sum fin foam sign, and once in final
position, in the item moss knife noose muff ).
Finally, of all quadruples containing alliterations (i.e., all Alliterating /Dissimilar and
Alliterating /Similar quadruples), half were arranged with initial phonemes in ABBA order,
and final phonemes in ABAB order (e.g., palm neck name pack, moss knife noose muff ).
The other half had the converse arrangement, with initial phonemes in ABAB order, and
finals arranged in ABBA order (e.g., soap dam seam dip; purse cat pot case). A summary
of the various items types used is presented in Table 1; a complete list of items is given in
Appendix A.
Procedure. Items were presented to subjects in written form on an 18cm ´ 13cm computer
screen. Word quadruples were displayed in black, bold, New York 20-point uppercase
characters on a white background; each word subtended a visual angle of 2.29 degrees. On
C. E. Wilshire 63
presentation of each word quadruple, subjects were asked to recite the item four times without
pausing, at a rate of 100 words per minute indicated by a metronome. Subjects were instructed
to concentrate on maintaining the rhythm regardless of whether they made errors. After the
subject had completed all four recitations, the item was removed and replaced by a blank
white screen. After a minimum rest period of ten seconds (sometimes longer if the subject
indicated the need to catch his or her breath), the experimenter initiated presentation of the
next item. Items were presented in one of two randomized orders. Each session began with
four practice items, and subjects were given a break of 5–10 mins halfway through the
items. Experimental sessions were tape-recorded for later transcription.
Error transcription and classification. Recordings of the experimental sessions were
transcribed by a native speaker using a broad IPA transcription. A conservative method of
error coding was used: segments whose phonemic identity was uncertain (e.g., those which
had acoustic features consistent with more than one target) were scored in favor of the
alternative which was closest in quality to the target phoneme. Each word response was coded
as to whether it was correct /incorrect overall; it was incorrect if it contained at least one
inappropriate phoneme in any position, or was missing at least one phoneme, or consisted
of an inappropriate fragment subsequently self-corrected (e.g., “f-bed”). Dysfluent attempts
(e.g., “b-bed”) were not counted as incorrect. Any purely visually-determined errors were
reported but excluded from the main error corpus. Here, a “visual” error was defined as any
instance in which: a) the error was an orthographic regularization of the target word (e.g.,
dose ® “doze”); or b) the relationship between error unit and corresponding target was
purely visual (e.g., cough ® “couch,” but not cup ® “cub,” where the relation is phono-
logical as well as visual). Each error was also coded as to the participating unit involved — that
is, whether it involved a word-initial consonant, vowel, word-final consonant, rime, onset-
nucleus pair, or all three segments of the word. Errors which were interrupted and
self-corrected immediately after the first consonant (e.g., cat ® “p-cat”), which are in
principle ambiguous between consonant errors and larger unit errors, were classified together
with uncorrected initial consonant errors. Nevertheless, these errors were also presented
separately for comparison in the relevant sections of the text. Finally, for consonant errors,
each error was also classified as to whether it had a source in the host quadruple; it was
considered to have a source if the erroneous phoneme was also a target phoneme elsewhere
within the host word quadruple. Often, defining the exact source element was difficult,
because the use of phoneme repeats and multiple reiterations meant that the source was
usually present in both the preceding and the upcoming context. When the analysis required
the identif ication of a single, exact source, that source was defined as the nearest identical
phoneme to the erroneous phoneme (any errors with two equidistant sources were excluded
from these analyses).
Statistical analysis. Except where noted in the text, error data was summed across the four
target words in the sequence and the four successive renditions of each item, then submitted
to analyses across both subjects and items (denoted by the subscripts “S” and “I” respec-
tively following the name of the statistic). Data distributions rarely met the requirements for
parametric analyses; for this reason, statistical analyses were performed using the bootstrap
resampling method, which assumes neither homogeneity of variance nor normality of
distribution (Diaconis & Efron, 1983; Efron, 1981; for statistical package, see Péladeau &
Lacouture, 1993). All such analysis used 5,000 samplings. In keeping with current thought
in behavioral statistics (e.g., Judd, McClelland, & Culhane, 1995, and references therein),
the omnibus test was not used; multiple-condition data was examined using pairwise
comparisons appropriately corrected for familywise error using the Bonferroni method
(Myers, 1979; corrected values of alpha are given in the text following the “a” symbol).
Finally, if more than 30% of cells for a given analysis contained zeroes, analysis across
subjects /items was not attempted; instead, error frequencies were submitted to a simple
nominal Chi-square analysis. All hypotheses were two-tailed. Nonsignificant values of
inferential statistics are not reported unless their values were of special interest (e.g., they
fell just short of significance, or their nonsignificance was unexpected or in stark contrast
to other findings).
Results
Subjects had no difficulty in fulfilling the requirements of the task; all were able to keep
pace with the metronome successfully. According to post-experiment reports, subjects did
not find the task particularly difficult or taxing, but many did comment on their frustration
at being unable to produce the targets they intended. Indeed, all 12 subjects reported this
sensation of being unable to match output to intentions on at least several occasions during
the task. Only 30 of the 583 errors committed on the task were visually-determined by the
definition given earlier. These errors were excluded from the error corpus in all subsequent
analyses.
Overall incidence of errors. This simple tongue twister task was effective at eliciting
errors, even though it did not require an unusually fast rate of speech nor explicit memorization
of the target strings. The error corpus (excluding visual errors) consisted of 553 incorrect
word responses, which constituted 4.5% of all words uttered in the experiment. Individual
error rates ranged from 1.5% for the least error-prone subject and 12.5% for the most error-
prone. Although individual differences were high, age was not a significant factor for this
small subject pool; in fact, the overall error rate for younger and older groups was an identical
4.5%, individual rates ranging from 1.5% –12.5% for younger subjects, and 3.0% –7.7%
for older subjects. Therefore, all further results presented are collapsed across both age groups.
There was no indication of strong overall practice or fatigue effects within sessions.
Overall, subjects’ performance did not differ significantly between the first and second half
of the experimental session: the average rate of errors for the first experimental block was
4.61%, and for the second block 4.48%.
In contrast, repeated recitation of each individual item had a strong effect on error
rates. Errors were significantly less frequent on first recitations (2.0%) than on second,
third, or fourth recitations (5.5%, 5.2%, and 5.4% respectively), tS(11)= 4.21, 5.14, and 3.68
and tI(63)= 6.66, 5.29 and 5.87 for first versus second, first versus third, and first versus
fourth recitations respectively, p< a (.008) in all cases. Differences among the later
recitations themselves were not significant. Despite the increase in errors on later recitations,
few such errors were exact duplicates of those committed on previous runs (only 11.5% in
total).
With respect to the role of item composition, the effect of including similar phonemes
was significant, but that of including phoneme repeats was less reliable. As can be seen in
C. E. Wilshire 65
TABLE 2
Experiment 1. Percentage of words incorrect
Item Type n % Incorrect
Control (case port bed moon) 6144 3.17

Alliterating/Dissimilar (palm neck name pack) 3072 4.62
Alliterating/Similar (moss knife noose muff) 3072 7.16
Overall Corpus 12288 4.53
Table 2, Alliterating /Similar items were more error-prone than Alliterating /Dissimilar items.
This effect was significant, tS(11)= 3.43, p< a(.025); t I (30)= 3.20, p< a(.025). However,
the difference between Alliterating /Dissimilar and Control items reached significance only
across subjects (tS(11) = 2.84, p< a (.025); tI(46)= 2.18, p<.1, not significant). Phoneme
arrangement was not an important determinant of overall error rate. Initial ABBA /Final
ABAB items (e.g., palm neck name pack) elicited a 6.4% error rate, and the converse
arrangement (e.g., soap dam seam dip) elicited a 5.3% rate. This difference was not statis-
tically significant.
Type of units involved in errors. In Table 3, errors are broken down according to the partic-
ipating linguistic units. On all three item types, the pattern of errors was similar. Single
segment errors were by far the most common error type. These segmental errors were pre-
dominately substitutions, rather than additions or omissions (97.9% overall). Consonant
errors were considerably more common than vowel errors (for the error corpus as a whole,
tS (11)= 6.02, p<.01; t I (63) =10.60, p<.01). This trend was visible even on Control items
which incorporated no special features which might favor consonant errors. In addition, word-
initial consonants were more prone to errors than word-final ones (for the corpus as a
whole, tS(11)= 4.06, p<.01; t I (63)= 3.83, p<.01). Again, this trend was evident even on
Control items, which contained no features which might have biased the distribution of errors
across words.
More detailed analysis of consonant errors. Most of the main effects observed in the analysis
of overall error rates also held for consonant errors considered alone. There was again a small
but unreliable effect of phoneme repetition (the difference between Alliterating /Dissimilar
and Control items was significant across subjects but not items: tS(11)= 2.81, p< a (.025);
tI(46)=1.91, p<.1, not significant). And there was again a significant overall effect for the
phoneme similarity manipulation (The difference between Alliterating Dissimilar and
Alliterating /Similar items was signif icant: tS(11) = 3.86, p< a (.025); t I (30) = 3.50,
p< a (.025)). In addition, the observed consonant error frequencies were also found to
correlate significantly with a more traditional measure of similarity derived from the feature
hierarchy of Sagey (1986). There was a strong, negative correlation between the number of
Sagey terminal nodes that differed between a given phoneme pair and the error-proneness
of that pair, r (22) = –.619, p< .01. A complete list of all the phoneme contrasts used and
their rates of error is given in Appendix B.
The majority of consonant substitutions showed symmetry in their substitution
patterns: they acted as replaced and replacing segments with approximately equal frequency.
TABLE 3
Experiment 1. Error participation rates of linguistic units expressed as a percentage of all
opportunities for error
Item Type
Error Unit Control Alliterating/Dissimilar Alliterating/Similar Total
Single Segments:
Initial consonants (all) 1.63 2.21 4.56 2.50
(interrupted only) (0.93) (1.14) (2.77) (1.44)
Vowels 0.20 0.42 0.20 0.25
Final consonants 1.09 1.66 2.34 1.55
Other Units:
Onset-nucleus pairs 0.03 0.07 0.03 0.04
Rimes 0.05 0.23 0.00 0.08
All segments 0.07 0.00 0.16 0.07
Other 0.16 0.10 0.07 0.12
Note: For Control items, n=6144 in all cells; for other item types,n=3072 in all cells; for totals,n=12288
in all cells.
The only consonant to show a significant asymmetry was /p/, which more frequently
acted as a replacing than a replaced segment (108 vs. 54 instances respectively, Chi-
Square Goodness-of-Fit Test, c2 (2, N=162)=18.00, p<.001).2 Thus, there was no general
tendency for articulatory gestures associated with slower execution times (e.g., continuants,
and segments with posterior places of articulation: Sigurd, 1973) to be replaced by more
easily executable ones (e.g., plosives and anterior places of articulation: Sigurd, 1973).
For items containing phoneme repeats, the distribution of consonant errors across
quadruples was found to be influenced by the pattern of the repeats. Overall, there was no
significant difference in the error proneness of ABBA and ABAB consonant sequences
(error rates were 2.8% and 2.6% respectively). However, there was a significant interaction
between pattern type and the location of consonant errors within the sequence (Standard
parametric analyses: FS (3,33) = 5.62, p<.01; F I (3,90) = 3.94, p<.05). As can be seen in
Figure 1, errors in ABAB sequences were approximately evenly distributed across the four
successive words of the sequence; there were no significant differences in error rates across
the four words. However, in ABBA sequences, consonant errors peaked at first and third
word position (the following pairwise differences were significant. First vs. second position:
t S(11) = 3.89, p< a (.004); t I (15) = 3.53, p<a(.004); second versus third position:
2
The behavior of /p/ is almost entirely attributable to a disproportionately high incidence of
unidirectional k ®p and /t/ ®/p/ substitutions (there were 31 instances of the former, and 30 of
the latter, but only 10 and 13 instances respectively of the reverse substitutions).The asymmetric
/t/–/p/ substitution pattern has been reported previously (see Stemberger 1991a, 1991b), but that
for /k/– /p/ is contrary to previous reports. One possible explanation for this result is that /p/ is
more easily detectable in the context of these kinds of sequences that involve immediately adjacent
closed syllables. This might result in more frequent reporting of errors in which /p/ replaces /t/
or /k/ than the reverse.
C. E. Wilshire 67
Figure 1
Experiment 1. Percentage of consonant errors involving each word in the target quadruple.
t S(11) = 4.50, p<a(.004); t I (15) = 4.24, p<a(.004); and third versus fourth position:
tS(11) = 3.62, p<a (.004); t I (15)= 3.12, p< a(.004)). In these items, first and third words
were the points at which the target consonant in question was repeated across two adjacent
words (e.g., palm neck name pack, palm neck name…; soap dam seam dip, soap dam
seam…). Note that the effect of these immediate repeats was to increase errors involving
the second of the two repeated phonemes; the first was relatively immune to error.
Presence and type of sources for consonant errors. A high proportion of consonant errors
were “contextual” in that they had a source elsewhere in the host word string — most
commonly in a corresponding word position. In Table 4, consonant errors are shown divided
into three groups: a) those which had a source phoneme in a corresponding word position
(e.g., purse cat pot case ® “curse cat pot case”); b) those with a source in a different word
position (e.g., tuck nod toad nook ® “tuck nod doad nook”); and c) those with no identi-
fiable source. Chance rates of occurrence of the three error types are also given.3 Overall,
the incidence of errors with same-position sources was far higher than would be predicted
3 Figures here refer to the rates of these three error types which would be expected by chance alone,
taking into account the number of opportunities for each error, and their spontaneous rates of
occurrence according to the Shattuck-Hufnagel/Klatt (1979) matrix. For example, the “chance”
probability that the target /k/ in case port bed moon will be replaced by one of its same-position
neighbors, would be 16/90 or 0.178, because according to the matrix, /k/ was replaced by /b/, /p/,
or /m/ in 16+0+0 of the total 90 /k/ errors. To obtain chance probabilities for an entire item set,
these figures were averaged across all targets in the quadruple, and across all relevant quadruples.
TABLE 4
Experiment 1. Frequency of consonant errors involving different types of sources (Chance rates
of occurrence are shown in parentheses)
Item Type
Source Control a Alliterating/Dissimilar Alliterating/Similar Total
Same Position 104 (45.2) 47 (3.0) 183 (42.4) 334 (90.6)

Different Position 22 (96.3) 28 (21.5) 10 (72.8) 60 (190.6)
None 42 (26.5) 42 (92.5) 19 (96.9) 103 (215.9)
Total 168 117 212 497
a There were twice as many Control items as other item types, so twice the opportunities for error.
by chance (Chi-Square Goodness-of-Fit Test, c2 (2, N=497) =799.54, p<.001), whereas

that for errors with different-position sources or no sources at all were both lower than chance,
c2 (2, N=497)=145.14, p< .001 and c2 (2, N=497)=104.21, p<.001, respectively. This trend
was also visible for Control items considered alone, suggesting it is not simply an artifact
of the phonological composition manipulations used here. Finally, the preference for errors
with same-position sources was higher for Alliterating /Similar items than for Alliterating /
Dissimilar items, c2 (1, N=329)=74.17, p< .001; indeed, virtually all of the difference in
error susceptibility between than Alliterating /Similar and Alliterating /Dissimilar items
appears to be due to this type of error.
The high incidence of errors with same-position sources was observed for both
word-initial and word-final errors, albeit somewhat more strongly for the former than the
latter. For errors involving word-initial consonants, 75.2% had a same-position source and
10.1% had a different-position source (chance rates 19.4% and 22.8% respectively), and
for errors involving word-final consonants, a somewhat lower 54.2% had a same-position
source and 15.2% a different-position source (chance rates 18.6% and 22.7% respec-
tively). The incidence of errors with same-position sources was significantly higher than
chance in both cases (Word-initial errors: c2 (2, N=307) = 612.26, p< .001; Word-final
errors: c2 (2, N=190)=158.68, p< .001).
For errors with same-position sources, those errors were more likely to be anticipa-
tions of upcoming phonemes than perseverations of previously-produced phonemes. This
was true regardless of whether the “context” was defined as the entire set of four reitera-
tions of the target word quadruple, or simply as the current recitation alone. Using the corpus
from Control items only — where there were no repetitions of phonemes to further
complicate the identif ication of sources, or to constrain error movements — the rates of
errors with sources in upcoming and preceding context were 78.4% and 21.6% respectively
using the “whole reiterative sequence” definition of context, and 77.5% and 22.5% using
the “single run” definition. Both differences were significant (Chi-square goodness-of-fit
test: c2 (1, N=74)= 23.84, p< .001, and c2 (1, N=102) = 30.75, p< .001 respectively). Even
if we exclude errors which were corrected midstream, which might have been erroneously
classed as anticipations rather than complete exchanges by virtue simply of their incomplete
nature, there is still a tendency for anticipations to outnumber perseverations: The rate of
C. E. Wilshire 69
anticipations becomes 74.4% for the whole sequence definition, and 62.8% for the single
run definition. 4
Discussion
This simple tongue twister task was effective in eliciting errors, even though it did not
require an unusually fast rate of speech or explicit memorization of the target strings. Further,
the nature of the errors themselves suggested their origin was primarily phonological, rather
than articulatory: if errors were largely the result of misarticulation, we might expect a
preference towards segments that involved central or “unmarked” articulatory positions.
This did not occur; most consonants participated equally often as replaced and replacing
segments. There was also little evidence that errors involving short-term recall or visual
decoding contributed strongly to the corpus. Subjects were frequently aware of their
errors, and often experienced the sensation of their output failing to meet their intentions,
which argued against a short-term memory account. Indeed, individual errors rarely persev-
erated from one recitation to the next, which indicated that subjects were not simply
“replaying” a degraded memory trace, but were constantly matching their output against
an external target. And purely visually-related errors were extremely rare in the present
task, suggesting reading errors were also not a major contributor to the error corpus.
An examination of the nature of the errors themselves also provides some additional
evidence that they are likely to have originated from the same general level of processing
as spontaneously-occur ring phonological “slips.” The errors behaved similarly to
spontaneous slips in a great many ways. They: a) most commonly involved single segments,
rather than larger sublexical units, and they involved consonants considerably more often
than vowels; b) frequently had a source phoneme in another word in the target utterance,
most commonly in a corresponding position in the word; and c) tended to be concentrated
in word-initial position (see Fromkin, 1971; MacKay, 1970; Nooteboom, 1969; Shattuck-
Hufnagel, 1979, 1983, 1987 for evidence that normal slips show these features). In addition,
it has been observed in previous experiments that errors elicited on this adaptation of the
tongue twister task have a greater-than-chance tendency to result in real words, just as do
spontaneous phonological errors (see Dell & Reich, 1981 on spontaneous errors, and
Wilshire & McCarthy, 1996 on the tongue twister task). The most parsimonious account
for all these similarities is that both classes of errors result from mis-selections involving
a common set of representations — namely, phonological (output) representations.
Two features of the task were found to contribute to its error-inducing potential. Firstly,
repeated recitation was important: second and subsequent recitations of the target were
found to be considerably more prone to error than first ones. The role of the reiterative
component of the tongue twister task will be investigated in greater detail in Experiment 2.
Secondly, phonological similarity was a critical feature. This was true for the original,
empirical definition of similarity used in item construction, and post-hoc analyses suggested
it was also true for a definition based on the Sagey (1986) feature hierarchy. The inclusion
of highly similar phoneme pairs had a particularly strong effect on the rates of contextual
4
Note that according to this scoring method, complete exchanges constitute two separate errors —
an anticipation and a perseveration.Therefore, their exclusion would not be expected to influence
the direction of the results obtained.
errors, which suggested that the manipulation tended to encourage a specific kind of
difficulty — namely, confusion between phoneme targets destined for the same string.
In contrast, however, the role of phoneme repetition in the tongue twister task was
less clear, and cannot be considered secure on the basis of the current findings alone.
Note, however, that the test for repetition effects used here may have been somewhat conser-
vative: the relevant “Alliterating /Dissimilar” items were constructed from phoneme pairs
rarely confused in spontaneous speech, whereas in the alliteration-free, “Control” items,
the only restriction on homologous phonemes was that they all be different. Considering
the powerful effect similarity appears to have on errors, this difference in item construction
may have partially offset any effect of phoneme repetition. Further, there were some
interesting findings concerning the local effects of phoneme alliteration. Error rates were
found to be particularly high on consonants which were repeats from the immediately
preceding word (e.g. fan tack turn fake; soap dam seam dip). Interestingly, this effect was
concentrated in the repeated phonemes themselves and did not extend to associated
phonemes: For example, adjacent words containing an initial consonant repetition (e.g.,
“tack turn” in fan tack turn fake) elicited a high rate of errors on the initial, repeated
consonants but relatively few on the final, contrasting consonants (overall, there were 113
errors of the former kind, and only 63 errors of the latter kind). This issue will be taken up
again below.
The susceptibility of individual phonemes to errors was not equivalent across all
word /syllable positions. Not only were consonants more error-prone than vowels, a finding
consistent with previous studies (Dell & Repka, 1992; Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1986; Shattuck-
Hufnagel & Klatt, 1979), but also word-initial consonants were more prone to errors than
word-final ones. This latter finding is at odds with Shattuck-Hufnagel (1987), who found
word-final errors to outnumber word-initial errors in a task using similar CVC quadruples.
This difference may reflect differences in the memory requirements of the two tasks in
question: Wilshire (1985) found that final errors outnumbered initial ones in a tongue twister
task only when the materials to be recited were to be recalled entirely from memory. When
the materials were on display constantly throughout the task, initial consonants were
found to be the more error-prone.
The investigation of consonant error sources provided evidence to support the
existence of a position constraint in phonological errors — that is, a tendency for consonants
in corresponding positions in the word /syllable to interact preferentially with one another
(a similar effect obtains in spontaneous slips: Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1987). Errors with sources
in corresponding word positions were considerably more common than would be expected
by chance, whereas those with sources in noncorresponding positions were less common
than chance. This held for both initial and final consonant errors — suggesting that the
position constraint might not be so easily reduced to a simple tendency for word onsets to
interact preferentially with one another.
Finally, it was found that errors were especially likely to involve the anticipation of
upcoming phonemes, rather than the perseveration of recently processed phonemes — at
least for Control items. This indicates that subjects did not complete the tongue twister
task by processing a single word at a time, but instead planned ahead across the target
word string. Experiment 2 will explore in greater detail exactly how speakers process and
encode the target phoneme sequences on this kind of highly redundant, reiterative task.
C. E. Wilshire 71
EXPERIMENT 2: THE ROLE OF REPEATED REITERATION

The findings from Experiment 1 demonstrated that reiteration constitutes an important
error-inducing feature of the tongue twister paradigm. However, the basis for the detrimental
effect of reiteration is still unknown. It is possible that the heightened error rates on later
recitations of an item simply reflect fatigue or “overload” of the phonological system due
to continual reactivation of phonemes. But repeated reiteration may also encourage the
use of particular strategies: for example, subjects might be able to make use of a previously-
constructed phonological “plan” on later repeats of a sequence. The use of such strategies
might further influence the error behavior observed.
Experiment 2 investigates the role of reiteration within the tongue twister paradigm
by comparing performance on a standard, tongue-twister task with that on a task which
has similar output requirements, but which does not involve repeated reiteration of a fixed
word sequence. In this comparison task (named the “Successive Task”), the same sets of
four words must be produced the same number of times each, and at the same rate, but
instead of being presented en bloc, the individual words in the quadruple are presented for
production one by one in an unpredictable order, a total of four times over. Higher-level
processing requirements are minimized by giving subjects the opportunity to familiarize
themselves with each of the four words before speeded production. Comparing performance
on this task and the tongue twister task should help us to isolate the role of repeated recitation
in particular, since both tasks share other factors which might influence error build-up within
trials — such as sustained output requirements — but differ as to whether they involve
recitation. Also, a more general comparison of the type of the errors produced on these
two tasks might provide some further insight into the way in which subjects accomplish
the tongue twister task.
It should be noted that our comparison task does not provide a perfect control
condition: In this task, subjects must not only produce the appropriate form for each word,
but must also select it from its competitors within the quadruple at relatively short notice.
This contributes a “choice reaction time” element to the task. However, this confounding
factor can be taken into account to some extent during error analysis — for example, by
separating possible word “selection” errors from clear examples of phonological mis-
productions.
Method
Subjects. The subjects were ten speakers of British English between the ages of 40 and 60,
drawn from a range of domestic, technical, and trades backgrounds. They were reimbursed
for their participation.
Materials. To generate the maximum amount of error data, the experimental items consisted
of the 16 Alliterating /Similar word quadruples from Experiment 1.
Procedure. There were two tasks — the Tongue Twister task and the Successive task. In the
Successive task, the four words of a given word quadruple were presented in isolation one
after the other a total of five times over. Each time, the words appeared in a different order
(e.g., moss… knife… noose… muff… knife… muff… moss… noose… etc.). Subjects were simply
asked to read each word aloud as it appeared on the screen. During the initial presentation of
the quadruple (the “Pre-Test Sequence”), subjects were given unlimited time to respond;
this run was not scored. At this stage, any errors the subject made in reading the words
aloud were corrected. Following this, words were presented at a rate of one every 600 ms
(approx. 100 words per minute). Each word remained on the screen for 500 ms, and was
replaced by a blank screen for the next 100 ms, after which the next word in the set was
presented, and so on. Subjects were instructed to say aloud as many of the experimental items
as they could, and not to worry if they missed one, or made a mistake. After all members of
a word quadruple had been presented a total of four times each, the screen went blank. Subjects
were then given a minimum rest period of 10s before the Experimenter initiated presentation
of the next set. Conditions of presentation of the word stimuli (type of screen, characters
used, size of visual angle subtended by the words) were the same as for Experiment 1. In the
Tongue Twister task, the procedure was identical to that adopted in Experiment 1, except
that each item was preceded by a “Pre-Test Sequence” identical to that used in the Successive
task. The rate of production was again 100 words per minute.
Each subject completed all 16 items in both tasks. Items were presented in blocks of
eight in a reversed counterbalanced order. There were four versions of the experiment,
differing as to block order. Each block was preceded by two practice items, and followed
by a rest period of at least five minutes. Experimental sessions were tape-recorded for
later transcription.
Error transcription, classification, and data analysis. The procedures for transcribing,
classifying and analyzing error data were the same as those used in Experiment 1. Error
data from the Successive task was scored in exactly the same way as that for the Tongue
Twister task, except that instead of summing errors across successive recitations when the
analysis called for it, errors were summed across successive presentations (or “passes”)
through the four-word target set.
Results
Overall incidence of errors. On the Tongue Twister task, subjects’ behavior was very
similar to that in Experiment 1. There were again very few purely visual errors: only eight
instances in total using the definition described earlier. Excluding those visual errors, the
overall percentage of words incorrectly produced was 7.8%— a similar rate to that observed
in Experiment 1 for the comparable, Alliterating /Similar items. On the Successive Task, none
of the subjects appeared to have difficulty keeping up with the relatively fast presentation
rate: out of the entire error corpus, there were only 11 instances in which a stimulus word
was completely missed /omitted. On this task, purely visually-determine d errors were
extremely rare: there were only two such instances. Excluding these, the overall percentage
of incorrect words produced was 12.2%. The Successive task elicited significantly more
errors than the Tongue Twister task, tS(9)= 2.47, p< .05; t I (15) =3.19, p<.01.
On the Tongue Twister task, the pattern of errors across successive passes through
the quadruple reproduced those observed in Experiment 1. As shown in Table 5, the first
recitation (or “pass” through the quadruple) was less error-prone overall than the second,
third, and fourth (tS(9)= 9.84, 5.02 and 5.54 respectively, p< a(.008) in all cases; tI(15)=5.76,
4.17 and 4.18 respectively, p< a(.008) in all cases). Again, differences among the later
passes were not significant. In contrast, on the Successive task, there appeared to be some
C. E. Wilshire 73
TABLE 5
Experiment 2. Percentage of words incorrect across successive passes through the target quadruple.
Figures excluding whole word and interrupted errors are in parentheses
Task
Pass Tongue Twister Successive
First 2.81 (1.41) 9.84 (3.44)

Second 11.09 (7.34) 14.06 (3.59)
Third 8.75 (5.31) 13.44 (6.56)
Fourth 8.59 (5.47) 11.56 (5.78)
Overall 7.81 (5.63) 12.23 (4.84)
Note: n=640 in each cell
build-up in errors from first to later passes, but this was not as pronounced as for the Tongue
Twister task. Indeed, none of the pairwise comparisons between first and later passes reached
significance (tS(9)=1.34, 1.26 and 0.57 for second, third, and fourth passes respectively,
ns in all cases; tI(15) = 2.52, 1.51 and 0.54 respectively, ns in all cases). As can be seen
from the bracketed figures in Table 5, this pattern does not seem to be due to a contami-
nation of the Successive task error data with whole word mis-selections: It does not appear
to change substantially when potential whole word mis-selections (word errors and
interrupted, self-corrected errors, such as “f-bed”) are excluded from the data.
If we compare directly across the Tongue Twister and Successive tasks, we note that
the advantage of the former over the latter is greatest during first passes. As can be seen
in Table 5, it is on first passes where Tongue Twister error rates are most noticeably lower
than Successive task error rates. This difference is highly signif icant, t S(9) = 3.03,
p< a(.0125); tI(15) = 4.74, p<a(.0125). On second and later passes, the Tongue Twister
task is still less error-prone than the Successive task, but the difference is not as striking.
Indeed, none of the pairwise differences between the corresponding passes across the two
tasks reached significance.
Type of units involved in errors. Table 6 gives a breakdown of errors according to the
participating linguistic units. For the Tongue Twister task, the distribution of error types
replicates that obtained in Experiment 1: The most common errors were segmental errors,
most particularly consonant errors, and word-initial consonant errors (corrected and
uncorrected considered together) outnumbered word-final errors, t S (9) = 2.38, p< .05;
t I (15) =3.01, p<.01.
In the Successive task, the main effects observed in the Tongue Twister task were
replicated: segmental errors — particularly consonant errors — were the primary error type,
and word-initial consonant errors were again more common than word-final errors,
tS(9)=5.70, p< .01; t I (15) =13.68, p< .01. But in this task, word-initial errors outnumbered
word-final errors to a much larger extent than for the Tongue Twister task. Indeed, comparing
directly across tasks, the overall incidence of initial errors (corrected and uncorrected)
was significantly higher in the Successive task than in the Tongue Twister task, and this
was the only error type which was more common on the Successive task, tS(9)= 3.61, p< .01;
TABLE 6
Experiment 2. Error participation rates of linguistic units expressed as a percentage of all
opportunities for error
Task
Error Unit Tongue Twister Successive
Single Segments:
Initial consonants (all) 5.12 9.18
(self-corrected only) (2.93) (7.23)
Vowels 0.20 0.39
Final consonants 2.38 0.70
Other Units:
Onset-nucleus pairs 0.00 0.08
Rimes 0.00 0.16
All segments 0.04 0.23
Other 0.08 1.29
Note: n=2560 in each cell
t I (15)= 3.94, p<.01. A large proportion of these errors were self-corrected. Thus, we cannot
rule out the possibility that the high incidence of initial errors might have simply been due
to an increased incidence of whole word mis-selections aborted midstream. However,
there was also an accompanying reduction in the incidence of final consonant errors: these
errors were significantly less common on the Successive task than on the Tongue Twister
task, tS(9)= 3.11, p< .01; tI(15)= 3.28, p< .01. This pattern suggests that on the Successive
task, there may also be a more general bias in favor of phonological errors early in the
word, compared to the Tongue Twister task.
Discussion. The results of Experiment 2 offer some insight into the way speakers
accomplish the highly reiterative tongue twister task. Overall, subjects made fewer errors
on the tongue twister task than on the comparison, nonreiterative task, which indicates
that speakers do take advantage of the redundancies inherent in the tongue twister task and
that this enhances their accuracy. This advantage was most pronounced for the initial pass
through the target quadruple, which suggests that being able to anticipate a word quadruple
ahead of time is most advantageous during the first production of the string, when that
plan must be generated completely from scratch. This “planning advantage” is considerably
reduced on later recitations. In fact, later performance is no better with advance planning
than without it. The difference observed between first and later tongue twister recitations
does not appear to be due to the novelty of the words: the effect was observed here even
though subjects had been pretested on each of the target words before recitation. Rather, it
seems to reflect some change which occurs after a string has been uttered once in its entirety.
One possible account is that speakers reutilize aspects of the previously-computed plan on
subsequent recitations (either because there is insufficient time to plan again from scratch,
or simply because reuse requires less resources), and that this strategy is associated with
some inaccuracy.
Finally, there were also some qualitative differences in the errors produced in the two
C. E. Wilshire 75
experimental tasks. Most particularly, there were actually more final consonant errors on
the Tongue Twister task than on the nonreiterative task. Such qualitative differences between
the two tasks are further suggestive of differences in their processing demands. This issue
will be taken up again below.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
These experiments have addressed a number of concerns held by researchers about the
tongue twister paradigm. One common fear is that the fast rates of speech used in such
paradigms may induce articulatory failures or motor programming errors, which may
contaminate the error corpus. Another is that the task may induce recall errors rather than
pure phonological “slips of the tongue.” Yet, in the particular task used here, a sizable corpus
of errors was obtained using a rate of speech that is arguably slower than that of natural-
istic speech and which is unlikely to create difficulty at the articulatory /motor programming
level. And the task made few explicit demands on short-term memory, because the target
string was constantly on display throughout the trial. Further, the quality of the errors in
Experiment 1 also suggested a prearticulatory, phonological encoding origin: Not only
was there no tendency for more easily-executable articulatory targets to replace more
difficult ones, as might be expected if errors were articulatory in origin, but also a number
of features of the errors were identical to those observed in spontaneous phonological errors.
And there was little direct evidence that visual errors or short-term memory failures were
contributing strongly to the corpus.
The current experiments also revealed much about how subjects perform the tongue
twister task, and how it induces errors. The high rates of anticipatory errors observed in
Experiment 1 suggested that subjects did not simply complete the tongue twister task by
processing a single word at a time, but instead planned ahead across the target word string.
Some further evidence for this was seen in Experiment 2: On initial passes through the
target word quadruple, subjects were much more accurate on the tongue twister task —
where the entire string could be planned ahead — than on a control task where words
could not be anticipated.
However, Experiment 2 also showed that with repetition of the tongue twister string,
this planning advantage was considerably reduced. In both tasks, error rates on second and
later recitations were considerably higher than on first recitations. These findings are
consistent with the notion that some change in processing takes place between first and
later recitations in this task. One hypothesis suggested above was that this change may be
to do with the way speakers reutilize aspects of the previously-computed plan on subsequent
recitations. By what mechanism might this be accomplished? Within a simple network
model of speech planning, we might propose that the sequential pattern of activity generated
across phoneme representations during the initial production of a string can be stored
temporarily, and regenerated for any subsequent recitation. This would reduce the amount
of new phonological processing that had to be performed. It is not important at this stage
to specify just how this phonological plan might be stored and reaccessed, but simply to
note that it is likely to be phonologically-coded and that its recovery leads to reactivation
of (output) phoneme representations in the same order in which they were originally encoded
(for evidence to support the use of a phonological code in short-term memory, see Baddeley,
1986; for some possible models of phonological short-term storage and retrieval, see Gupta
& MacWhinney, 1997; Hartley & Houghton, 1996). Because the stored /reactivated repre-
sentation is subject to noise /decay, it is imperfect. A phoneme correctly produced on the
first recitation may not become sufficiently reactivated to win the competition for selection.
Consequently, second and later recitations of the string would be expected to be more prone
to errors overall.
However, it seems clear that a stored and reactivated phrasal “plan” is not the only
source of support used by speakers during repeat recitations of tongue twisters. There is
evidence to indicate that speakers also actively use the written stimulus itself while they
are in the process of (re)producing the target sequence: Shattuck-Hufnagel (1983) and
Wilshire (1985) both found that error rates on the tongue twister task were considerably
higher when no written stimulus was available to subjects during production, so that phono-
logical encoding had to be achieved entirely on the basis of a stored representation. Thus,
on second and later recitations of the string, it is likely that speakers may still read the
stimulus words as they produce them, and that activation generated via this “route” might
be used to supplement that recovered from previous planning — particularly in cases
where an error was detected on a previous rendition.
Repeated recitation was not the only feature of the tongue twister paradigm which
was found to contribute to its error-inducing potential. Experiment 1 demonstrated that
the inclusion of highly similar phoneme pairs in the target sequence also had a significant
error-inducing effect. In many current network models of phonological encoding, similarity
effects are attributed to the operation of feedback activation; highly similar phonemes
activate one another as a result of a feedback via their many shared feature representations
(e.g., Dell, 1986, 1988; Stemberger, 1985, 1990). This mutual activation effectively increases
levels of activation in competing phonemes, and thereby increases the likelihood of
confusions between them. This account provides an elegant explanation for the overall error-
inducing effect of similarity, as well as its selective effect on contextual errors involving
the similar phonemes themselves. If this account of similarity effects is correct, then this
feature of the tongue twister paradigm operates in quite a different way from repeated
reiteration. While the former is a passive mechanism associated with activatory decay, the
latter is linked to an active, feedback-mediated process. There is some independent evidence
to support the notion that similarity and repeated reiteration operate in separate and
distinct ways: Wilshire (1994) found that the performance of a mildly phonologically-
impaired patient on the tongue twister task exhibited the “normal” tendency for errors to
increase between first and later recitations, but failed to exhibit a similarity effect. This is
exactly what we would expect if similarity effects were associated with feedback activation,
a process likely to be operating suboptimally in an impaired speech production system
(see also Schwartz et al., 1994).
Finally, in Experiment 1, the role of phoneme repetition as an error-inducing device
was not established as secure. Nevertheless, an analysis of the position of consonant errors
in the host quadruple revealed that “immediate” phoneme repeats (i.e., repetition of the same
phoneme in the same position across two consecutive words) were associated with elevated
error rates on the second repetition of the phoneme. Therefore, it is likely that phoneme
repetitions of the kinds used here may also prove to be an important error-inducing device.
But we need more powerful evidence for this before we can draw any firm conclusions.
C. E. Wilshire 77
In conclusion then, when carefully conducted, the tongue twister paradigm appears
to be capable of inducing true prearticulatory phonological encoding errors. To achieve
this, it seems to rely heavily on repeated reiteration, and on the presence of combinations
of highly similar phonemes. The inclusion of phoneme repeats, at least when in combination
with phoneme oppositions, may also contribute. Nevertheless, it is important to bear in
mind two important issues raised in the current experiment. Firstly, although the origin of
errors in the tongue twister task is likely to have been the same as for spontaneous phono-
logical errors (i.e., mis-selections involving phonological output representations), the
evidence suggests that the cause of these errors may have been quite different. For example,
it was hypothesized that one major cause of phonological errors on second and later
recitations of tongue twisters may have been degradation of a temporarily-stored phono-
logical “plan” of the target phrase. While a similar mechanism may also play a role in certain
spontaneous errors (particularly when speakers are reciting “stock phrases” and the like),
we can by no means conclude that this is the primary cause of errors in spontaneous
phonological encoding.
The second issue to bear in mind is that many of the error-inducing features of the
paradigm had subtle, qualitative effects on errors in addition to their gross effects. In
Experiment 1, the inclusion of similar phonemes in alliterating target sequences not only
increased overall error rates, but also affected the composition of those errors — namely,
it induced disproportionately more “contextual” errors. Similarly, in Experiment 2, the error
corpus obtained using a tongue twister task differed in a number of subtle, qualitative
respects from that obtained using a speeded single word production task, particularly with
respect to the relative error-susceptibility of word-initial and word-final consonants.
These observations attest to the fact that a corpus of errors cannot easily be separated from
the conditions under which it was obtained. It is therefore worth emphasizing that the tongue
twister paradigm is best used as a context for manipulating individual speech variables,
rather than as a means of generating errors to “supplement” spontaneous data, or to be
studied in isolation from their origins. An error corpus obtained using such a task is best
interpreted within the context of a detailed model of the task which generated it. In this
respect, it is hoped that the theoretical outline of the tongue twister task proposed above
may be useful as a framework for interpreting and evaluating future findings obtained using
this paradigm.
In addition to their implications for the tongue twister paradigm itself, findings from
the present study also provide some new theoretical information about the process of phono-
logical encoding. The findings of particular theoretical interest concern: a) the distribution
of consonant errors within words (their high concentration in word-initial position); b)
the effect of repetition of a phoneme across two adjacent words; and c) the position
constraints on sources for contextual errors. Each of these will be discussed in turn. Firstly,
consider the observation that word-initial consonants were more prone to errors overall than
word-final ones. This effect was observed in Experiment 1, and was also obtained — in fact,
to an even greater extent — on the one-at-a-time word production task in Experiment 2.
This finding contributes to the increasing body of evidence that word onsets have a special
status in phonological encoding (see also MacKay, 1970; Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1987). It has
been explored in detail in a more recent study, which found the phenomenon to be: a)
unique to real word production (it disappears if tongue twister strings are composed entirely
of nonsense words); and b) due entirely to the behavior of between-word contextual

errors, which are heavily concentrated in word-onsets (see Wilshire, 1998). These obser-
vations suggest that lexical-level competition — specifically, order competition between
words in the sequence — may be a major cause of word-initial errors, and may be an
important contributor to the high error rates observed on these units. (Indeed, according to
this account, the one-by-one task in Experiment 2 might be seen as one in which there is
an even greater opportunity for lexical competition between the four words in a quadruple —
and hence even more potential for word-initial errors.) The reader is referred to Wilshire
(1998) for a more detailed analysis.
Next, consider the observations concerning the effect of immediate repetition across
two words. In Experiment 1, it was found that consonant error rates were elevated when
the target to be produced was a repeat of a phoneme in the previous word. This effect was
clearly located within the repeating phonemes themselves, and did not extend to other
phonemes within the host words in question. This runs counter to what would be predicted
if it were the result of lemma-level competition between the sound-sharing host words;
under this account, we would expect a concentration of errors on the phonemes by which
the two words contrasted (where the words compete), rather than on those which they shared
(where the words reinforce one another). Also, the effect was strongly perseveratory: it
was the second of the two immediately repeated phonemes which became particularly error-
prone in this situation. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the notion that
the immediate repetition effect is due to the operation of a postselection self-inhibition
mechanism. Most network models are equipped with such a mechanism, which serves to
inhibit a phoneme after it has been selected, thereby rendering it less accessible for
reselection for a short period of time immediately following (see e.g., the models of MacKay,
1987 and Stemberger, 1990). The present data suggest that this period of postaccess
inhibition extends at least across the time it takes to produce a single CVC word: repeats
of the same phoneme as part of the immediately subsequent CVC word showed a significant
effect. The data are thus inconsistent with models which propose that the period of self-
inhibition is so short-lived as to be negligible (e.g., Dell, 1986,1988; Sevald & Dell,
1994).
Nevertheless, it is important to note that these effects of immediate repetition were
obtained within the context of a task which maintained uncertainty regarding whether a
phoneme repetition would occur or not (at third word position, both eventualities were
equiprobable). Results might not necessarily be the same for targets in which repeats were
predictable and redundant (e.g., cat c up c ook code or tack pick sock duck ). Such
predictable alliteration does not appear to be associated with particularly high error rates
(see Dell & Repka, 1992; Schourup, 1973, for discussion). Thus, it may be possible to
“set” the system for producing alliterations in such a way as to reduce the likelihood of
error. Such questions constitute an interesting starting point for further investigation of the
effect of different types of repeats on phonological encoding performance.
Finally, we turn to the observations concerning the position of source phonemes for
consonant errors. In Experiment 1, it was found that errors were highly likely to have a
source in a corresponding word position, but unlikely to have a source in another word
position. This indicates that phoneme position (whether it be defined in terms of the word
or syllable) plays an important role during phonological encoding. The question which
C. E. Wilshire 79
remains unanswered is whether “position,” in this sense, is best defined in terms of the word
or the syllable. If the appropriate unit is the syllable, then the present results can be accom-
modated by a number of existing models of phonological encoding. A great many such
models postulate that phoneme representations are permanently marked as to their syllabic
positions, and that phonemes are associated with their appropriate positions in the target
utterance on the basis of these position markings (see e.g., Dell, 1986, 1998; MacKay, 1987;
Stemberger, 1985, 1990). Hence, the only phonemes which can compete with one another
for any one position are those that share syllable position. However, it is not at all clear
that the syllable is indeed the most appropriate unit for defining position: Shattuck-Hufnagel
(1987) presents some convincing evidence from spontaneous errors that the word, rather
than the syllable, may be the better defining unit. If the appropriate unit turns out to be the
word, then the explanation is less transparent. This question is one which may be addressable
within the tongue-twister paradigm itself. If we use word strings made up of bisyllabic
words with clear syllable boundaries (e.g., magnet, victim…), we can compare the relative
incidence of contextual errors which preserve word position with those which preserve only
syllable but not word position. This is certainly another promising line of investigation
worth pursuing using the tongue twister paradigm.
In conclusion, then, the experiments reported in this paper have not only served to
allay many of our worst fears about the tongue twister paradigm, but have also provided
considerable insight into the demands it makes on processing and the way it induces
errors. It is hoped that this will allow researchers to take greater advantage of this paradigm
in future studies. The present investigations also generated information of theoretical interest
in its own right — some of the findings challenge current models of phonological encoding,
and others provide a starting point for new investigations. These results highlight the
usefulness of the paradigm in eliciting information not readily available using other exper-
imental techniques.
Received: October 22, 1997; revised manuscript received: April 15, 1998;
accepted: October 13, 1998
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APPENDIX A
Experiment 1: Stimulus Items

Control: Alliterating/Dissimilar Alliterating/Similar
cub time date sin dip sauce tuck pod tin map type moon sap tiff surf top
pot tack card fern cape sock knob tiff bed cough card beef pod cab cord pub
type cough peat sack pub moss fork tape date fern foot den dirt bus boot dose
fake nap tot den talk nod cap seam bomb fight farm bait tone sum time sin
fuss kit tab beef pub surf base map palm neck name pack dart book dock bait
bait sum dock turn bus farm nook soup palm neck name pack moss knife noose muff
face calf pack nut curb knife sum pat cough dot deaf kit feat pick pat fork
pass fin boot sack curse foam top beak kiss food code face soup talk sack tape
map code dart tack deaf kiss fort book tuck nod toad nook fort pass fuss peat
name cub tone peak sob cat purse food sock puff park safe port tack peak tot
palm foot cork tip kid turf moat neck curse map cape mess moat nap mop nut
case port bed moon pot toad fan cape mass pub mob pass cap tick cork top
mop pass tin cough sock cab puff dam sauce beak sock base purse cat pot case
top pick cord mass bomb sap knife mess sack cub cork sob cape turf tip calf
soap cuff dirt noose fight cork toad safe soap dam seam dip sum fin foam sign
mob dose feat park bait tick muff sign cuff knob knife curb cub toad tab kid
APPENDIX B
Experiment 1. Incidence of consonantal errors involving the various phoneme contrasts used in alliterating
items (“Alliterating/Dissimilar” and “Alliterating/Similar” items).
Contrasts used in Alliterating/Dissimilar items Contrasts used in Alliterating/Similar items
Contrast Phonemic Distance Frequency of Contrast Phonemic Distance Frequency of

(Sagey, 1986) errors* (Sagey, 1986) errors*
bf 2 6 bd 1 13.5
bk 2 8 fp 1 11.5
bs 3 12 fs 1 8
df 3 6 kp 1 14.5
dk 2 7 kt 1 16.3
ds 2 5 mn 1 13.5
fk 2 11 pt 1 25
ft 2 7 st 1 8.3
km 3 6
kn 3 2
ks 2 11
mp 2 8
mt 3 3
np 3 8
nt 2 12
ps 2 5
* For contrasts used more than once, the average frequency of errors per contrast is given.

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LAN GUAGE AN D SPEECH, 1999, 42 (1), 57– 82 57

The “Tongue Twister” Paradigm as a

KEY WORDS ABSTRACT

Item Type n Description Example

Control 32 phonemes used only once in case port bed moon

Item Type n % Incorrect

Control (case port bed moon) 6144 3.17

Same Position 104 (45.2) 47 (3.0) 183 (42.4) 334 (90.6)

by chance (Chi-Square Goodness-of-Fit Test, c2 (2, N=497) =799.54, p<.001), whereas

EXPERIMENT 2: THE ROLE OF REPEATED REITERATION

First 2.81 (1.41) 9.84 (3.44)

of nonsense words); and b) due entirely to the behavior of between-word contextual

Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY on May 28, 2015

Experiment 1: Stimulus Items

Contrasts used in Alliterating/Dissimilar items Contrasts used in Alliterating/Similar items

Contrast Phonemic Distance Frequency of Contrast Phonemic Distance Frequency of

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