Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speech errors are often perceived as categorical substitutions of one sound for another, but phonetic analyses have consistently revealed that errorful productions retain a phonetic trace of the target category. These trace effects have been taken as evidence for the simultaneous activation of multiple categories, both exerting influence on speech production. We develop a dynamic neural field model of voice onset time (VOT) planning, showing how multiple activated categories can be resolved in the field to show trace effects. We evaluate model predictions against measurements of VOT for voiced and voiceless stops in speech error experiments and naturalistic corpora.