Phonological processing in a syllable-timed language with pre-final stress: Evidence from spanish speech error data

In previous studies on English and German slips-of-the-tongue, it was shown that consonants at the beginning of words are more susceptible to malfunction than in any other position and that segments belonging to stressed syllables are more vulnerable than those in unstressed syllables. An in-depth analysis of a large corpus of errors reveals that both of these empirical claims cannot be replicated for Spanish. In the Spanish language, it is true that onset errors outnumber coda errors as in German and English, but nonword-initial, syllable-initial substitutions are found to be more common than word-initial ones. Furthermore, segmental slips-of-the-tongue occur with chance frequency in stressed and unstressed syllables. Both findings are not a trivial processing consequence of some structural particularity of Spanish. These results question the validity of processing models that have been proposed to account for data from the Germanic languages. Two hypotheses are discussed: (1) The stability of word onset consonants may be due to the fact that Spanish is a pre-final-stress language. (2) The equal involvement of segments from stressed and unstressed syllables may be attributable to the fact that Spanish is a syllable-timed language. However, neither of these hypotheses is found to be without its problems.