Cognitive Neuropsychology

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Complexity of articulation planning in apraxia of

speech: The limits of phoneme-based approaches

Wolfram Ziegler

To cite this article: Wolfram Ziegler (2017) Complexity of articulation planning in apraxia of
speech: The limits of phoneme-based approaches, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 34:7-8, 482-487,
DOI: 10.1080/02643294.2017.1421148

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2017.1421148

Published online: 18 Feb 2018.

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COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY, 2017
VOL. 34, NOS. 7–8, 482–487
https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2017.1421148

SHORT REPORT

Complexity of articulation planning in apraxia of speech: The limits of

phoneme-based approaches
Wolfram Ziegler
EKN–Clinical Neuropsychology Research Group, Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This report presents evidence suggesting that the phoneme-based approach taken by Romani, Apraxia of speech;
Galuzzi, Guariglia, and Goslin (Comparing phoneme frequency, age of acquisition, and loss in articulatory gesture;
aphasia: Implications for phonological universals. Cognitive Neuropsychology, this issue) falls short markedness; metrical foot;
phoneme
of capturing the complexity of articulation planning in patients with apraxia of speech. Empirical
and modelling data are reported to demonstrate that the apraxic pathomechanism resides in the
hierarchical architecture of phonological words rather than in the context-independent
properties of phonemes. Because the factors determining complexity of articulation planning are
interlaced between gestural, syllabic, and metrical levels, they cannot be captured by
markedness rankings limited to any of these levels.

Introduction utterance, this does not necessarily imply that pho-

In their target article, Romani, Galuzzi, Guariglia, and
Goslin (henceforth referred to as RGGG) have collected
an impressive amount of evidence to throw light on
the role of phonological universals in speech pro-
duction. In an unprecedented synopsis of phoneme
frequency distributions, age of acquisition data, and
clinical data from apraxic speakers, they address long-
standing questions of complexity in linguistic typol-
ogy, language acquisition, and language disorders.
As one of their major outcomes the authors suggest
that the concept of phonological markedness is essen-
tially grounded in articulatory principles. Their argu-
ment is mainly based on the finding that patients
with apraxia of speech (AOS)—a syndrome generally
considered to result from impaired speech motor
planning—make more errors on phonemes with
marked than with unmarked feature values.
I agree with the idea that phonological markedness is
an epiphenomenon of phonetic principles, although I
wonder how far arguments based on phonemes can
take us on this issue. In particular, one may ask
whether the mechanisms underlying AOS are actually
rooted in phonemes with their context-independent
properties. While it is obvious that the perceived
speech errors of patients suffering from AOS can, on
the surface, often be allocated to the phonemes of an
nemes are actually the carriers of the apraxic mechan-
ism. Hence, reflections on phonological universals
bearing on AOS as a clinical model of articulatory com-
plexity might benefit from a perspective that transcends
the phoneme-based account emphasized by RGGG.
Phoneme errors in AOS: Tips of an iceberg?
As an illustration of the problem, (1) lists a collection of
speech samples produced by apraxic speakers in a
word repetition task. The target is the German word
/fʁɔʃ/ (engl. frog):
(1) /fʁɔʃ/ → [fɔʃ, ʁɔʃ, fɔx, fəʁɔʃ, fʁɔs, pʁɔʃ, ʃʁɔʃ, fʁɔts,
fʁɔxs, fʁɔfʃ, fʁɔxʃ, ʃfʁɔx, pfʁɔxʃ]1
The examples are drawn from a study reported in
Ziegler and Aichert (2015), in which 66 samples of
/fʁɔʃ/ (along with 135 other words) were collected
from a large group of AOS patients. The list provides
an illustration of how the sound pattern of /fʁɔʃ/ can
be ruined in speakers with AOS, not including more
devastating breakdowns like word fragments,
aborted attempts, or null reactions.
Are error patterns like those listed in (1) ascribable
to a “loss” of phonemes with high markedness ranks,

CONTACT Wolfram Ziegler wolfram.ziegler@ekn-muenchen.de

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

as suggested by RGGG, or is it rather the overall pho-
nological structure of an utterance, including its sylla-
bic and metrical pattern, that triggers such errors?
From the perspective taken in RGGG, the errors in (1)
arise because the consonants of /fʁɔʃ/ have rather
unfavourable markedness values. Accordingly, the
fact that /f/, /ʁ/ and /ʃ/ are often omitted or substituted
by other phonemes in (1) may suggest that the three
typologically complex consonants are indeed the
trouble spots of the apraxic pathomechanism. In
short: If /ʃ/ is omitted or replaced, /ʃ/ must be the
error source.
However, other observations challenge this view:
Claiming, for instance, that /ʃ/ is intrinsically
complex, why should an apraxic speaker re-duplicate
it, as in [ʃʁɔʃ], or substitute it by a still more marked fri-
cative, as in [fɔx]? Why should apraxic patients add
further consonants with high markedness values to
make the word even more complex, as in [pfʁɔxʃ] or
[fʁɔxs]?
In the explanation outlined here, the phoneme
additions, deletions, and substitutions observed in
apraxia of speech may merely represent the perceived
surface phenomena of some deeper underlying dys-
function, namely one that is rooted in the hierarchical
architecture of the gestural patterns of phonological
words.
Nonlinear gestural model
The observation that accuracy in apraxia of speech is
influenced by several mutually interacting factors
such as phoneme and syllable number, syllable type
and complexity, or metrical structure has led us to
develop a hierarchical model of apraxic impairment
(Ziegler, 2009; Ziegler & Aichert, 2015; Ziegler,
Aichert, & Staiger, 2017). In this nonlinear gestural
(NLG) model, the basic motor planning unit is the
articulatory gesture as conceptualized, for instance, in
articulatory phonology (Goldstein, Pouplier, Chen,
Saltzman, & Byrd, 2007). During articulation planning,
appropriate gestures must be selected and integrated
into larger co-ordinated structures (Tilsen, 2016).
In the NLG model, apraxic errors are considered to
arise because one or more gestures in a word go
wrong. Notably, the likelihood that a gesture is per-
formed accurately is not conceptualized as a
context-independent magnitude, but rather as a func-
tion of the gesture’s position within a syllable (onset
COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY 483
vs. coda), a metrical foot (head vs. tail), or a phonolo-
gical word (e.g., in an upbeat syllable), and by consid-
ering its coordination and synchronization with other
gestures within the same syllable constituent, either
sequentially, as in a consonant cluster, or in synchrony
with a glottal or velar opening gesture. The NLG model
represents phoneme markedness only indirectly by
distinguishing between two constriction types—that
is, complete closure (in plosives and nasals) versus
incomplete closure (in fricatives, approximants, and
liquids).
The NLG account considers speech errors on a pass-
fail basis—that is, no distinction is made between
error locations, error types, and different degrees of
distortion. The model thereby accounts for the possi-
bility that an apraxic dysfunction caused by some par-
ticular property of a word’s gestural score may
propagate across the whole word and crop up at not
necessarily predictable places along the word’s
phoneme sequence. Referring to the examples listed
in (1), a single mechanism—at most varying by
degree, but not by type—is considered to create the
different error variants of /fʁɔʃ/. This approach differs
from the phoneme-based account of the RGGG
study, in which segments are conceived as both the
source and the target of speech motor planning errors.
Trained on error data from large samples of apraxic
speech, the NLG-model provides numerical estimates
of how gesture production accuracy is influenced
across the hierarchical levels of a word’s gestural
score (Ziegler, 2009; Ziegler & Aichert, 2015).
In the following, several interacting factors influen-
cing accuracy of articulation in AOS will be discussed
on the background of phoneme-based versus hier-
archical accounts, by referring to complexity estimates
obtained from the NLG model.
Error sources in AOS
Phoneme number
Any phoneme-based account of apraxic impairment
predicts that the vulnerability of a word is a function
of its number of phonemes, or, considering the
examples listed in (1), its number of consonants. In a
linear account of consonant-based apraxic errors (i.e.,
one in which each consonant is considered as an inde-
pendent error source), word production accuracy
would be predicted to decrease by power-law with
484 W. ZIEGLER
increasing numbers of consonants. Figure 1 (dotted
line) depicts the predicted accuracy values of words
comprising between one and eight consonants. The
starting value, p1, is an empirical accuracy estimate
based on 120 samples of six single-consonant words
(4 CV, 2 VCV, where C = consonant, V = vowel) pro-
duced by patients with AOS (Ziegler, 2009). Across
all 720 productions, 63.9% were correct. Considering
this number as an estimate of the likelihood of accu-
rate consonant production, the likelihood of accurate
production of an n-consonant word is .639n, if each
consonant is a separate error source. If n = 8, for
instance, this amounts to a predicted accuracy of
only .028 for an 8-consonant word.
The solid line in Figure 1 represents the observed
accuracy values of words with increasing numbers of
consonants, showing that the actual accuracy rates
in multi-consonant words were much higher than a
purely consonant-based model would predict.2 This
suggests that there must be motor planning mechan-
isms by which segmental units are integrated into suc-
cessively larger constituents. The NLG model with its
hierarchical architecture yields a considerably better
fit of the observed data (dashed line), suggesting
that the syllabic and prosodic embedding of gestures,
Figure 1. Word production accuracy in apraxia of speech (AOS)
as a function of word length (in numbers of consonants). Pass–
fail accuracy values were averaged across 120 samples of 96
words and nonwords spoken by 40 apraxic patients (from
Ziegler, 2009). Item numbers per word length were 6, 17, 23,
21, 10, 11, 6, and 2, respectively. Solid line: observed accuracies.
Dashed line: accuracies predicted by the nonlinear gestural (NLG)
model. Dotted line: accuracies predicted by a model based on
consonants as independent error sources. Starting value of the
consonant model is the estimated likelihood that single-conso-
nant words are produced accurately—that is, p1 = .639.
as conceptualized in the NLG model, overrides the
influence of phonemes on word production accuracy
in AOS.
Onset versus coda
While phoneme markedness is context independent, a
phoneme’s vulnerability to apraxic failure depends on
its position in a syllable: Pre- and post-vocalic conso-
nants are not the same for apraxic speakers (cf.
Croot, 2002; Schoor, Aichert, & Ziegler, 2012). There-
fore, any markedness approach to AOS should also
consider syllable markedness theories. Extending the
account discussed in RGGG to syllable types, one
would predict that for AOS patients CV syllables are
less error prone than VC syllables, because the
former are less marked than the latter (Clements &
Keyser, 1983; Romani & Calabrese, 1998). However,
several reports suggest that the reverse is true
(Aichert & Ziegler, 2013; Croot, 2002). While this con-
flict is interesting in itself, the question to be answered
here is how phoneme-related complexity is traded off
against syllable type complexity in AOS.
Figure 2 (left panel) plots accuracy values of the
German words /te:/ (tea), /fe:/ ( fairy) and /aɪt/ (oath),
averaged over 66 samples spoken by patients with
AOS (Ziegler & Aichert, 2015). The three words have
equal numbers of consonants, but /te:/ vs. /fe:/ differ
in the markedness ranks of their consonants, /te:/ vs.
/aɪt/ in syllable markedness, and /fe:/ vs. /aɪt/ in
both. Markedness considerations predict that both
/fe:/ and /aɪt/ are more difficult than /te:/, but there
is no straightforward prediction across the two con-
flicting contrasts—that is, whether /fe:/ or /aɪt/ is
more demanding in terms of articulation planning.
The NLG model allows for computations of accu-
racy estimates for each word based on the word’s hier-
archically structured gestural score. The coefficients
used here were derived from a corpus of 136 different
words spoken 66 times each by apraxic patients
(Ziegler & Aichert, 2015, Table 4). According to this
model and consistent with markedness consider-
ations, /fe:/ is more difficult than /te:/ by a factor of
0.90. Yet—against markedness arguments—/aɪt/ is
1.09 times easier than /te:/. While the cross-dimen-
sional relationship between /fe:/ and /aɪt/ escapes
any straightforward markedness ranking consider-
ations, the NLG model predicts an advantage of /aɪt/
over /fe:/ by a factor of 1.21. The observed accuracies
 COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY 485

Figure 2. Word production accuracy as a function of phoneme versus syllable markedness (left), consonant deletion versus schwa inser-
tion (middle), and metrical versus segmental complexity (right). Solid lines: empirical data for selected word triple examples (averaged
across 66 samples from apraxia of speech, AOS, speakers; Ziegler & Aichert, 2015). Dashed lines: accuracy values predicted by the non-
linear gestural (NLG) model, based on 66 samples each of 136 words. Numbers indicate the extent to which a factor facilitates or inhibits
speech motor planning in the NLG model, relative to the reference word in the middle. *p < .01.

(solid lines in Figure 2) fitted these estimates quite
closely.
Onset clusters and markedness asymmetry in
speech errors
A markedness issue heavily discussed in the aphasia
and AOS literature relates to consonant clusters. It
has frequently been reported—by the RGGG group
and by others—that complex syllables are more
prone to apraxic and phonological impairment than
syllables containing only singleton consonants
(Galluzzi, Bureca, Guariglia, & Romani, 2015; Romani
& Galluzzi, 2005; Staiger & Ziegler, 2008). This finding
is in agreement with markedness accounts of syllable
structure (Romani & Calabrese, 1998).
A much debated observation in speakers with AOS
(and in patients with aphasic phonological impair-
ment, likewise) is that they often reduce the complex-
ity of a consonant cluster by either introducing a
schwa between the two consonants or deleting one
of them. Both error types are considered to resolve
the complexity of consonant clusters by reducing
markedness at the syllable level, to the detriment of
faithfulness of the realized surface form. In Optimality
Theory based accounts this is taken as evidence that
markedness principles play a role at both the phonetic
and the phonological processing level in speech pro-
duction (Buchwald, Rapp, & Stone, 2007; Miozzo &
Buchwald, 2013). By extension of the markedness
approach pursued in RGGG, such accounts claim mark-
edness asymmetry—that is, that errors tend to result in
less marked structures (for a discussion see Goldrick &
Daland, 2009).
Yet, an issue that has escaped notice so far is that
insertion of a vowel between two consonants alters
the metrical structure of a word. If, for instance, /klo:n/
(clone) is changed into /kə’lo:n/ (Cologne; Buchwald
et al., 2007), a monosyllable is changed into an iambic
disyllable, with a concomitant markedness increase at
the metrical level (Féry, 1998). Hence, in vowel epenth-
esis the complexity of a cluster is reduced at the
expense of increased metrical complexity.
The middle panel of Figure 2 illustrates how the two
conflicting complexity dimensions are negotiated in
AOS. The cluster word /glʏk/ (engl. luck), taken from
the corpus of Ziegler and Aichert (2015), is compared
with two nonwords resulting from the two alternative
error types through which the word-initial cluster is
dissolved—that is, consonant deletion (/glʏk/
→ /gʏk/), and vowel epenthesis (/glʏk/ → /gə’lʏk/).
The data represented by dashed lines in Figure 2 are
NLG estimates of their ease of articulation planning.
As predicted by markedness considerations, conso-
nant deletion is associated with a considerable
decrease of complexity in the NLG model (factor
1.24). However, contrary to prevalent assumptions,
vowel epenthesis in onset clusters leads to an increase
of complexity, due to the formation of iambic forms
(factor 0.84; Ziegler & Aichert, 2015, Table 3, Figure 4).
Since, for obvious reasons, no empirical data were
available for the two nonwords /gʏk/ and /gə’lʏk/,
the two closest word-matches available in our
corpus were chosen to test whether the NLG estimates
486 W. ZIEGLER
fitted empirical accuracy values. To this end, /gʏk/ was
represented by a CVC word from the corpus—that is,
/buːx/ (engl. book)—and /gə’lʏk/ by a structurally
comparable iambic word—that is, /ga’lɔp/ (engl.
gallop). The observed accuracy scores of these two
words across 66 samples (solid lines in Figure 2)
were fairly close to the NLG estimates of their corre-
sponding nonwords.
Against expectations, therefore, monosyllabic onset
cluster words are less complex than their disyllabic
vowel epenthesis cognates. Hence, by inserting a
schwa between the two consonants of a cluster,
speakers with AOS or with phonological impairment
offend faithfulness and markedness constraints at
the same time. As a consequence, explanations of
vowel epenthesis errors in AOS and aphasia based
on the markedness asymmetry principle should be
treated with caution, because they ignore the proso-
dic consequences of this error type.
Metrical versus syllabic complexity
German-speaking apraxic patients make more errors on
iambic than on trochaic words (Aichert, Späth, & Ziegler,
2016; Ziegler & Aichert, 2015). The effect conforms to
markedness properties (Féry, 1998). Notably, the
iambic pattern elicits higher proportions of segmental
errors—that is, errors allocated to individual phonemes.
This finding provides strong evidence for a hierarchical
organization of motor planning and for the idea that the
locus of a perceived error (i.e., the phoneme) is not
necessarily also the locus of its underlying mechanism.
The right panel of Figure 2 gives a computational
account of the trochee-effect in AOS. It displays, as
an example, accuracy values of /’padəl/ (engl. paddle)
vs. /pe’da:l/ (engl. pedal) taken from the database of
Ziegler and Aichert (2015). The observed accuracy of
the iambic /pe’da:l/ was considerably lower than that
of the trochaic /’padəl/, although the two words com-
prise the same consonants (solid line). Computation-
ally, the NLG account rewards gestures in the tails of
metrical feet and punishes extrametrical gestures
(Ziegler & Aichert, 2015; Figure 4), resulting in a signifi-
cant advantage of trochees over segmentally similar
iambs by a factor of 0.74 (Figure 2, dashed line).
More importantly here, the figure also illustrates how
metrical complexity interacts with syllable structure. It
includes, as an example, the German word /’vaxtəl/
(engl. quail), which is more marked than /pe’da:l/ at
the phoneme and the syllable levels, but less complex
at the metrical level. Motor planning hierarchies associ-
ated with such conflicting contrasts are not directly
amenable to markedness considerations. However,
the NLG model renders the three complexity levels com-
mensurable: According to NLG coefficients, the accu-
racy estimate of the complex trochee is considerably
lower than that of its simple counterpart (factor 0.71;
dashed line in Figure 2), but is almost on a par with
the segmentally less complex iamb. The observed accu-
racy values of the three words (solid lines in Figure 2)
correspond fairly well with their NLG estimates.
Discussion
The perspective of this commentary differs fundamen-
tally from the approach taken by Romani and col-
leagues in their target article: In the view outlined
here, speech motor planning requirements involve
the selection of appropriate articulatory gestures and
their coordination within and across syllable and
metrical constituents, rather than a planning of separ-
ate phonemes with context-independent properties
such as higher or lower markedness values.
The motor routines by which gestures are selected
and meshed together to form words are considered to
be language-particular. They are learned during
speech acquisition (Tilsen, 2016). In speakers with
AOS, gesture selection and coordination fail as a con-
sequence of their lesions in the left posterior inferior
frontal cortex. Such failures can be triggered at any
place within a word’s gestural score, but structures
that are more frequent in the patient’s language and
are exercised more often, such as the trochaic metre
in German, are more resilient, because they are more
strongly wired in the speaker’s brain.
How can the phoneme markedness effects
described in RGGG be explained from this perspective?
Certain parameters, such as the delicate aerodynamics
of fricative noise generation or of obstruent voicing,
may be particularly sensitive to even minor malfunc-
tions arising at any fracture point within the gestural
architecture of a word. The observation that apraxic dis-
turbances tend to surface more often on fricatives than
on plosives, or on voiced than on unvoiced obstruents,
may therefore be explainable by the perceptual sal-
ience of even small aerodynamic disruptions caused
anywhere within a word containing such segments.
Such articulatory-to-acoustic instabilities may also be

causative in rendering these phoneme classes typolo-
gically less prevalent than others.
Notes
1. The 13 samples were produced by 13 different patients.
Any diacritics describing the gradual phoneme distortions
and awkward phoneme transitions that were also present
in most of them were omitted in the transcripts in (1),
leaving only errors by which, on the surface, phonemes
were added, deleted, or substituted by other phonemes.
2. The higher than predicted accuracies of longer words
cannot be explained by lower markedness ranks of
their consonants, because the empirical starting value
of the consonant model was obtained from words
whose consonants (all plosives) already had considerably
low markedness ranks.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Ingrid Aichert and Anja Staiger for longstanding
collaboration on this topic.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
The work referenced here was supported by the German
Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft,
DFG) [grant number ZI 469/9-1/9-2/14-1/14-2];
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