Serial-order control is a fundamental aspect of speech processing, and analyses of speech errors provide clues to the mechanisms that control this phenomenon. The present study employed a speech-error induction technique to identify speech errors that strongly resembled recall errors observed in verbal immediate serial recall. In three experiments, participants repeatedly produced a target word/nonword and, immediately before the utterance, were unexpectedly exposed to an auditory distractor word/nonword, which was either phonologically similar or dissimilar to the target. This technique successfully induced within-word phoneme exchange/transposition errors and elicited a within-word serial-position effect. On the other hand, lexical/semantic variables (e.g., lexicality of the target) led to only a very weak effect. We discussed mechanisms for the retention and production of a phoneme sequence in the context of these results.