Griffin, Z. M. , Bedore, L. M. , Hixon, J. G. & Peña, E. D.
University of Texas at Austin
As speakers repeat a tongue twister, they make fewer errors but a greater percentage of errors tend to be anticipatory (Dell et al., 1997). These error patterns are critical for understanding serial ordering mechanisms in language production and how the time course of planning changes as a function of short- and long-term language experience. In an extension with 32 bilingual and 32 primarily monolingual English-speaking adults, participants repeated twisters twice slowly and then quickly 10 times paced by a visual and auditory metronome. Twisters such as 'Treefrogs tickle twitchy trout' and 'Tres tigres temen trampas' were designed to more easily distinguish between anticipatory and perseveratory sound errors than Dell?s items did.
Descriptive statistics the unsurprising result that errors of all types declined with repetition (from 15.6% for first and second fast repetitions to 6.9% for 9th and 10th repetitions in English). Monolingual and bilingual speakers had similar overall error rates for English twisters (10.0 and 10.8% respectively). Spanish twisters were somewhat easier (7.5% errors for bilinguals). We will report results of analyses of anticipation and perseverations that permit more fine-grained characterization of changes with repetition than available in 1997 and how these patterns may differ based on language experience.