This paper reports an analysis of errors made by English-speaking learners of French. Forty learners learned a set of French words, and were subsequently tested in their ability to produce a correct phonetic form for these words. Nearly two-thirds of the attempts were incorrect, but a detailed analysis of these incorrect forms showed that not all parts of the target form were equally liable to error. Initial consonants are particularly stable, while subsequent parts of words are not reliably recalled. These results share some similarities with studies of slips of the tongue in English.
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