Speech Errors of Tone in Taiwanese

In this study, we analyze tone errors of Taiwanese spontaneous speech to tackle three issues. The first is to make a comparison between segmental errors and tone errors in Taiwanese to see if these two kinds of errors behave similarly. The second is to investigate the role of language-specific tone rules in the occurrence of tone errors. Taiwanese, with a unique and complex tone sandhi phenomenon, provides a good ground to examine this issue. The third issue is to investigate the mechanism of Taiwanese tone sandhi phenomenon. Consider the first issue. The results showed that tone errors and segmental errors have similarities as well as differences. Second, our study showed that language-specific tone rules play an important role in the occurrence of tone errors. Moreover, regarding the mechan-ism of the tone sandhi phenomenon, our results seemed to support the allomorph-selection model better. Analysis on speech errors provides different evidence to investigate the grammar of speech production, the reality of phonological rules as well as processes, and th