A parallel licensing model of normal slips and phonemic paraphasias

Abstract

A model of phonological processing in speech production based on prosodic licensing can capture general patterns of errors found in both normal and aphasic speech. All segments must be licensed by some prosodic category (syllable, nucleus, or rime) in order to be produced. Constraints on licensing, including both phonotactic and binding constraints, ensure that only correct licensing associations are retained. A computer simulation of our model produces utterances in qualitative agreement with human speech error data. Phonemic paraphasias are claimed to arise from the same mechanisms as normal speech errors; the difference being only a matter of disturbance of the lexical retrieval and licensing processes. The fact that these errors, which can involve gross disruption of the segmental sequence, still produce phonotactically well-formed strings is a direct consequence of the syllabic licensing that forms the core of our theory of speech production.