Abstract Narrative Phonological theory is an abstract theory of the sound systems of natural languages. There has been a continuing debate among linguists for some two decades now as to whether the entities and rules postulated by phonological theory in order to account for purely linguistic data have any psychological reality in the mind of the speaker. Since psychological reality itself is not accessible to direct observation, this is a complicated issue to test empirically. The project proposed here is a particularly clever and well thought out series of experiments designed to test empirical predictions of some specific aspects of phonological theory, based on the elicitation of speech errors in controlled conditions. Pilot work has suggested the existence of a surprising asymmetry of error types which, if it holds up under further investigation, yields strong support to some fundamental assumptions of phonological theory. The proposed experiments will investigate this phenomenon in detail. The Principal Investigator is a young scientist whose record is already one of remarkable productivity. He can be expected to carry out this interesting project successfully.
