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2005 Jun 14 (Tue)

I know it's been a little over 3 months since the discussion took place, but I wanted to put this up because it was what I was thinking about at the time, and I'm still interested. The discussion about circumnavimgate took place on phonoloblog at the end of April. I am no way an expert in spectrogram reading, but I looked back at the handouts I got in my Phonetics course (particularly this one) and agreed with Daniel Hall's analysis that the F2 formant suggests the nasal in question is alveolar. But then I thought about it a bit more, and I'm wondering if anyone knows of an instance where a velar nasal does show an even F2 or F3 transition, possibly because of the vowel before or after it. Or does anyone know what the formant transitions of a palatal nasal are? Even tho' a palatal nasal isn't in the word "circumnavigate" (and therefore wouldn't be an example of a copy), it still is what might be there, no? Maybe even because the speaker's target was [n], yet because of the following [g], the actual contact was palatal. (I'm thinking of what Browman and Goldstein talked about in "Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech"(1987).) I have never seen a spectrogram of a palatal nasal, and I've never been told how to distinguish it from other nasals. In general, it seems there's more F2-F3 "pinching" the farther one moves toward the velum (from the lips). So a palatal would sorta be somewhere in between an alveolar and a velar nasal, right? Anyway, I did find Phonetic Explanations For Nasal Sound Patterns by John Ohala in Nasalfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and Nasalization (which I scanned a portion of), which talked a bit about nasal acoustics. On page 294, Ohala mentions the very thing that this discussion is about: engma being confused with [m] and [n].

This may be totally off-topic, and probably shows the extent of my ignorance, but I'm curious about the categorization of the different types of speech errors that have been studied. On page 296, Ohala also writes:

Nasal-stop clusters tend be homorganic. This is undoubtedly follows in part from the acoustic similarity of the various nasal consonants, i.e., as they are auditorily ambiguous as to place of articulation they may be articulatorily re-interpreted.

At the start of the circumnavimgate discussion, Eric Bakovic mentions circumnavimgate as a speech error. I'm thinking that this speech error is a purely phonological one. I mean, if it's phonological, then it's because it goes against the tendency that Ohala mentions, right? A phonetic speech error would be like when someone who did not have a velar nasal in their native language and uses another nasal (i.e., [n]) instead. Would a syntactic speech error would be like mixing up word order (I can't think of an example off the top of my head)? And a semantic speech error I think is like when I say "two" and mean to say "three", or when I say "retired" when I mean to say "resigned". Do all these types fall into the category of "speech error", or do these things have their own names? Is there such a thing as a pragmatic speech error? What would that look like?

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